People born in the middle of a century, like me (1952), tend to look back to the beginning of the century, the time of their grandparents’ youth, as well as to the end of the century, the time of their own maturity and old age and also of their own grandchildren. As someone interested in history since childhood, this has always been true for me. As a 12 year old already I had become fascinated with the First World War, was aware of the dangers of nuclear war and also wondered with expectation and some concern what the new 21st century, the new millennium, would be like. But I was also born ‘in between’ in space as well as time: I was born on the Welsh side of the southern end of the border between England and Wales, near a town, Caerleon, which, 2000 years ago, had been garrisoned by the II Legion Augusta of the Roman army, and I grew up from ages 3 to 18 on the English side of the northern end of that same border, in the city of Chester, where, 2000 years ago, the XX Legion Valeria Victrix of the Roman army was stationed for about 330 years. The two places are almost vertically aligned at the north and south end of the border. My father was a Welsh soldier and my mother an English local government civil servant. So, my entry into and early upbringing in this life was spent on this border and between those two locations, both once ancient Roman army bases, north and south, east and west of each other -  between the English and Celtic cultures.

My father was in the Royal Signals, traditionally the British Army’s communications specialists, who have as their cap badge the symbol of Hermes, or Mercury, the messenger of the gods, who was always travelling ‘up’ and ‘down’ between the human and divine worlds. In astrology, Mercury is said to ‘rule’ the sign of Gemini (The Twins), under which I was born. The two major stars of Gemini are those of Castor and Pollux. Castor looks like one star to the naked eye, but is actually a sextuple star system consisting of three binary pairs, while Pollux is a single giant star. In Greek mythology, Castor was mortal and Pollux immortal. Traditionally, the 12 signs of the Zodiac are said to relate to parts of the human body. The binary sign of Gemini, with its two vertical and two horizontal (slightly curved) lines, is usually associated with symmetry and the shoulders and arms in the human body.

“Do you know about the number 23?”

Given all these things, plus the fact that from the age of 21 until 29, I lived in Japan and so my small east-west bicultural (Anglo-Celtic) experience in Britain was expanded across Eurasia, it is not surprising that even before I encountered the mysterious number 23 at the age of 30, the question of finding a balance between two poles and overcoming dualism had already become something of an existential one for me. It is perhaps the Geminian issue. By the time I had arrived at university aged 18, I had understood that political extremes were to be avoided, so I was drawn to none of the extremist groups that were then common in university politics. Yet in Japan I found myself encountering a culture that was in many ways, compared to Britain, one of extremes: of climate, of natural disasters, of the soul life and behaviour of the people, of religious practice, of ancient and modern. How on earth to bridge East and West between Japan and Britain and within myself? It took years to find an answer to this question.

In my first week at university to study history, I bonded in friendship through a shared interest in architecture and music with a physics student from Yorkshire. We were born just 16 days apart at midsummer. His interests at the time mostly had to do with aspects of space and technology, mine with time and history.  We were like chalk and cheese but remained close friends, despite my years in Japan, until his death 4 years ago. A Cancerian very much concerned for his material environment and proud of his Yorkshire heritage, he travelled very little outside of Britain yet was one for extremes and spent most of his life veering from one to the other. While I was expanding my mind and experience in Japan, he expanded his by plunging into the world of drugs and was lucky to survive. Then, like his LSD ‘hero’, American professor Timothy Leary, he moved on, aged 30, from drugs to computers. At that time, I too was 30 years old and had discovered the work of Rudolf Steiner only months before. After my years in Japan, I was more than ready for it. I soon found that in Steiner’s work I had finally discovered the bridge that I had been looking for between east and west, between past and present, arts and sciences, Christianity and Buddhism. It was around that time when I was visiting my friend’s flat in London one day, he suddenly asked me: “do you know about the number 23?”

The Threefold Social Order of the Body Social (1925), an old English collection of Steiner’s ideas on the threefold social organism, was the first thing by Steiner I ever read, aged 29. And as stated above, having just returned from my first seven years in Japan with questions about East-West relations, my encounter with Steiner’s emphasis on threefolding, as distinct from western dualism in philosophy, politics and economics, gave rise to numerous conversations on such matters with my friend. It was in that context that he asked: “do you know about the number 23?”

The Discordians

He had come across “the mystery of the number 23”, also sometimes called “the 23 enigma”, through his reading of the Discordians. They were a group of Americans in California in the late 50s/early 60s who created the pseudo-religion of Discordianism, which worshipped the ancient Greek goddess Eris, the goddess of chaos, confusion, strife and discord. Much influenced by ancient Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen philosophies that were fashionable among the 1950s Beat Generation, the American Discordians sought to rebel against society in a playful and paradoxical, absurdist way by declaring that all concepts of order and disorder are illusions. In their principal text, the Principia Discordia, they wrote: “If you can master nonsense as well as you have already learned to master sense, then each will expose the other for what it is: absurdity. From that moment of illumination, a man begins to be free regardless of his surroundings. He becomes free to play order games and change them at will. He becomes free to play disorder games just for the hell of it. He becomes free to play neither or both. And as the master of his own games, he plays without fear, and therefore without frustration, and therefore with good will in his soul and love in his being.”(1) It was perhaps no coincidence that one of the two originators of Discordianism, Kerry Thornley (1938-1998)(left), was a good friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged killer of President John F. Kennedy. This friendship drew Thornley into the murky world of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, and ardent conspiracism, as well as the equally ardent lampooning of conspiracism, became a staple of Discordian writings.  Later in the 1960s, Thornley and fellow Discordian founder Greg Hill (1941-2000) got to know novelist William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), and also Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007) and Robert Shea (1933-1994), two editors at Playboy magazine of libertarian, anarchistic and agnostic mind, who also became Discordians and wrote the cult classic book The Illuminatus! Trilogy, published in 1975, which amongst other things spawned a fascination with the secret society of the (Bavarian) Illuminati. Wilson, together with Timothy Leary (1920-1996) and Terence McKenna (1946-2000), became iconic figures of the 1970s counterculture. The influence of the Discordians appealed to the antinomian inclinations of the youth movements of the 1960s and 70s and was ‘recycled’ with the growth of the Internet in the 1990s; it has since permeated varied aspects of contemporary postmodern culture: the fascination with Far Eastern philosophies, paradox, absurdism, nihilism and meaninglessness, synchronicity, and conspiracism, as well as experimentation with drugs. Having learned of the 23 enigma from William S. Burroughs, the Discordians chose the number 23 as a kind of emblem or icon of their pseudo-religion. My friend was very fond of the Discordians because of their wacky sense of humour, and did not enquire too far into the 23. But I did enquire, and was to find that the 23 enigma was far from wacky; on the contrary, it is profound and awesome.

Robert Anton Wilson (below) described how he first heard of the 23 enigma from William S. Burroughs, who “had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.” (2) The Discordians, approving of all things paradoxical, were drawn to apparent synchronicities like this. Both Burroughs and Wilson made extensive collections of examples of weirdness relating to the number 23, but they never came to any conclusion about what the number signified. Wilson in particular was opposed to conclusions per se!

A 23 database

Like Burroughs and Wilson, after I learned of the supposed significance of the number 23, I also made such empirical collections of incidences of the number that appeared in my life and in history, in the news, in movies etc. almost every month from 1989 until 2008 in Britain, and in Japan when I was living there from 1991- 1994; they became quite a large database, far too large to be replicated here. When I did not actively search, I remained open, and the number would ‘appear’ to me in many places. This search and these serendipitous appearances convinced me that there was indeed something special about the number 23, so to test it, I used other numbers as ‘controls’: I looked in current events and history for other numbers, chosen at random, such as 17 and 37. I did not come across them in history and current events anywhere near as frequently as I found 23. I became convinced that the number was deliberately placed in movies, TV dramas, news broadcasts, sometimes subliminally – this was not the case with other numbers – and that furthermore, it was not so much the number 23 itself that was important, i.e. two 10s and 3 units, but rather, the combination of a 2 and a 3, the juxtaposition of the numbers of duality and threefoldness.

For good or ill, and so far, one would have to say the balance has been for the most part ill, Hollywood has become the English-speaking world’s way of presenting stories and mythologies to the peoples of the world, and Hollywood movies have been full of references to 23 for many decades. One only has to be alert and open one’s eyes to see them. I did not see them myself before the mid-1980s, they passed me by, but once I became aware of their existence, they soon showed themselves, often in sinister contexts which reflected Hollywood’s predilections. For example, the murder victim would be found in hotel room number 203, or the drug deal would be worth $230 million dollars or the key percentage in a corrupt financial scam would be 2.3% etc. In other words, all permutations of 2 and 3, the numbers of duality and trinity, were and are very frequently presented to us in movies, often in subliminal and fleeting ways. This means by the screenwriters, directors or producers. But at other times, they occur very blatantly. In 2007 a humorous but ultimately sinister American horror movie, not one of the most gruesome, was released, titled The Number 23 (left), directed by Joel Schumacher and starring comedian Jim Carrey. It was about a dog handler who became obsessed with a book about the number 23. Here, Hollywood literally thrust the 23 enigma into the faces and minds of the public, and in a dark and sinister way. Yet even after this movie, the references to 23 went on occurring in many, many more movies, and still do.2 Sometimes, I sense that a 23 is inserted into a movie by a screenwriter or a director just as a fad, a fashion with no ulterior motive, done in a trivial way just because it appears in other movies, but other times, in more  important cinematic contexts, the number is clearly very deliberately placed to signify, usually, that something sinister is about to happen or that an important choice is about to be made or has been made.

To give just a few examples of the significance of the number from my 23 database: ‘macrocosmically’, the angle of the Earth’s axis is tilted at 23.44o to the plane of the earth’s orbit around the Sun (above).(3) The Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are at 23.26° north and south respectively. It’s worth keeping in mind perhaps, especially in this year 2023, that the Tropic of Cancer runs right through the island that is currently a bone of contention between China and the USA, namely Taiwan. This 23° angle of the Earth’s axis to the Sun and the ecliptic gives us the seasons of the year, around which most human cultural life has been based throughout history. ‘Microcosmically’, human cells normally have 46 chromosomes arranged in 23 pairs. Of these 23 pairs, 22 are alike in males and females; these are called the “autosomes.” The 23rd pair are the sex chromosomes ‘X’ and ‘Y’. So, we see that both on the planetary scale and on the individual human scale the number 23 is profoundly related to human physical life on this planet. Rome is located on a line of longitude 23 degrees west of Jerusalem – for many Christians the world’s true centre. Due north of Rome on that line is Venice, a city of beauty, intrigue and decadence. Further north lie Leipzig/Chemnitz and Copenhagen. The line also passes just west of Potsdam, outside Berlin. It is in fact roughly the line of the Iron Curtain 1945-1989. South of Rome the line touches the westernmost point of that beautiful but troubled isle of Sicily, with its dark and turbulent past.

Turning to events in history and current affairs, the Tropic of Capricorn passes through French Polynesia (where A-Bomb tests were conducted from 1966-74), northern Chile/Argentina, Paraguay, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro is located at exactly 23° south of the equator. The colossal statue of Cristo Redentor (Christ The Redeemer) which stands above Rio de Janeiro is situated at 22° 57′ south. The observation deck at the foot of the statue is reached by 223 steps and is located on the Corcovado peak, which is 2,300 ft (700m) high.

King James I

Turning from space to time, when I was a young boy, I memorised the reign dates of all the monarchs of England. This became a useful framework for me to orient myself in my study of history. When in my early 30s I discovered that Rudolf Steiner had said that King James I (1603-1625),(4) of the House of Stuart, was one of the most significant British monarchs in whom “an extraordinary initiate soul lived”(5), a statement that might surprise many people. This does not necessarily mean that James was an initiate soul in his life as James but could mean that he had been an initiate in a previous life and that something of those previous abilities had passed into his life as James. After all, elsewhere Steiner also described him as “one of the greatest, most gigantic spirits of the British realm” who “stands quite close to the opposition against what is merely commercial within the British commercial empire”. “James,” he says, “brings in a new element by continuously inoculating into the substance of the British people something that they will have forever, something that they must not lose if they are not to fall utterly into materialism. What it is that he inoculates into them is something that is linked by underground channels to the whole of the rest of European culture. Here we are confronted by a significant mystery.”(6) Steiner does not tell us overtly what this mystery is, but he did drop a hint, because in the same lecture, immediately before speaking about King James, he mentioned the lawyer, statesman and philosopher of science Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the great playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the German mystic Jacob Böhme (1575-1624), and Jacob Balde (1604-1668), a southern German Jesuit poet, and said that these four very different men were all inspired from the same source!(7) Bacon and Shakespeare, very ‘worldly’ men, were both personally connected to James, Bacon as his Attorney-General and Lord Chancellor, and Shakespeare as one of his favoured entertainers – the King’s Men – and the country’s leading playwright, who wrote several plays with themes specifically intended for James, such as Macbeth and Hamlet. Bacon was eventually found guilty on 23 charges of corruption in 1621 and briefly imprisoned. Shakespeare’s collection of plays, known as the “First Folio”, was published in 1623, seven years after his death. Böhme and Balde, who did not know each other, were both men of the spirit, of mysticism and poetry respectively. In indicating these four men, Steiner was pointing to “an impulse which says that a link ought to be created with the opposite pole”(8) – the link between the spiritual and the material. This is the essence of Rosicrucianism – the black cross and the red roses.

I decided I should look more closely at King James (above), and soon found that he had the same birthday as me! Around the time I discovered that particular Steiner lecture in which King James I was mentioned, my godson was born with the same birthdate as King James and me, and his parents, not knowing about King James I, decided to name him James. Many years later, when I was giving a lecture on British history in Newbattle Abbey, the former home of the Marquesses of Lothian about seven miles from Edinburgh, I found that directly opposite me on the wall at the other end of the room was a very large portrait of King James VI and I. The king had made the first Earl of Lothian, Mark Kerr, a Privy Counsellor; he was an important nobleman very close to the king. I found that very many significant things did indeed occur during the reign of King James I. Born in 1566, he became King James VI of Scotland at the age of only one year old. In July 1589, when he was 23, his betrothal to Anne of Denmark was sealed; he married her by proxy in August 1589 and in November he travelled by sea to Norway in the one romantic episode of his life to meet his bride, with whom he then travelled to Denmark before returning with her to Scotland in May 1590. He thus spent almost all the year when he was aged 23 on securing his wife, with whom he would later have the son who would become Charles I, of infamous memory (beheaded in 1649 during the English Civil Wars, the first English monarch to be tried and publicly executed). In the early 18th century, when the modern political party system was emerging in Britain, the system was defined by men’s attitudes towards the Stuart monarchy – for or against. The German Hanoverian monarchs of Britain (from 1714), from whom stem the present Royal Family, were descended from James VI and I’s daughter Elizabeth Stuart, who married the German Prince Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate. During his return to Scotland from Denmark in 1590, James, concerned that witches may have tried to sink his ship, became fascinated by the question of witchcraft, of which, as he was a scholarly king, he then made a study and published a book, Daemonologie (1597). Here we have the darker side of the number 23. The Discordians linked 23 with what they called ‘the Law of Fives’, because 2 + 3 = 5 and they were keen on pentagons and pentagrams, both of which rightly have 3 points above and 2 below, but when turned upside down, place the 2 above the 3 – the inverted pentagram being a traditional sign of the Devil. The moral ambiguity of the pentagram appealed to the Discordian penchant for chaos over law and order.   James became King of England by succeeding Queen Elizabeth I, who died early on 24 March 1603, so 23rd March was her last full day as Queen of England and James’ last day as King only of Scotland. James was the 23rd king of England since the Norman Conquest in 1066, and he died on 27 March 1625, just 3 days into the 23rd year of his reign. Many significant things happened in James’ reign, not least the joining, in James’ person, of the two crowns of the old enemies England and Scotland. James’ government made peace between England and Spain only one year after the very pacific James, who had a horror of violence, came to the throne in 1603. This peace was not popular with the people of England but was very farsighted, because by it, the East India Company (founded 1600) was able to flourish, and England extended its trade throughout the world and planted its first colonies in N. America (Jamestown, Virginia) and the first English trading factory at Surat in India (1615). Then there was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Guy Fawkes and other Catholic rebels sought to blow up King James, all his court and the members of Parliament, and the planting of Scottish Protestant settlers in Ulster, N. Ireland (from 1606), which still has difficult consequences today. There was also the production of arguably the two greatest treasures of the English language – the King James’ Bible (1611)(9) and the First Folio of the plays of William Shakespeare (1623).

The King James Bible is replete with examples of the number 23. In verse 23 of Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis, we read: “And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.” On the fifth day God had created the first living creatures, in water and air.  23 is thus related to the number 5 and to living beings. Chapter 23 of Genesis, however, entirely concerns the death and burial of Abraham’s wife, Sarah. In the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament, in Chap. 23, verse 23, we read: “Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob (= Jacobus = James), neither is there any divination against Israel: according to this time it shall be said of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!” What do we find on either side of this verse? Verse 22 says: “God brought them (Jacob and Israel) out of Egypt; he hath as it were, the strength of an unicorn”, while verse 24 says: “Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion; he shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the blood of the slain.” King James I added the unicorn to the lion in the royal coat of arms of the monarchs of England, which pair of creatures have been the royal heraldic animals of Britain ever since.(10) The two animals, the unicorn and the lion, represent wisdom and strength. In I Kings 7:15-16 we are told that the two pillars of the temple of Solomon, Jachin and Boaz measured 18 cubits each, plus 5 cubits for the capitals, a total height of 23 cubits for each pillar. The erudite King James was frequently referred to as “Solomon” in his time.

This purported ‘Solomon’, as King James VI of Scotland was initiated into Freemasonry in Scotland in 1601 (in the Lodge of Scoon), and when he also became King James I of England two years later, the beginnings of modern ‘speculative’ Freemasonry (i.e. Freemasonry as a symbolic system rather than as an operative craft) came down to England from Scotland after him. The two pillars Jachin and Boaz from the Temple of Solomon, representing thinking/wisdom and feeling/strength respectively, are an important feature of Freemasonic symbolism. According to Steiner, these pillars refer back to the “cosmos of wisdom” (also called the Old Moon in Anthroposophy), which was the phase of the  development of the earth and solar system that preceded our present phase, and also to the still earlier phase known as the “cosmos of strength” (aka the Old Sun). ‘Old Saturn’, ‘Old Sun’ and Old Moon’ were terms Steiner used for the three conditions of the solar system and of the earth that, many aeons ago, preceded the present condition. They do not refer to the three heavenly bodies we see today. “What the earth has inherited from the cosmos of strength is expressed in [the present] Mars and what it has inherited in the cosmos of wisdom is expressed in [the present] Mercury. The mission of the earth itself is to add love to these” – the impulse of the heart between those of will and thought respectively. Mars puts iron in the earth and in the blood, brings form and condenses matter. Mercury brings the relational aspect of wisdom that enables thinking to relate things to everything else. Steiner also spoke in his lecture on the Apocalypse of St. John of these three principles, strength, wisdom and love,  represented on earth when Christ appeared between Moses (wisdom) and Elijah (strength) in His Transfiguration on a mountaintop, most likely Mt. Tabor.(11) The two pillars were represented in the 4th of the seven Seals of the Apocalypse that Steiner had made in 1907.(12) of that year. (see below).

Shakespeare, Hamlet and 23

Shakespeare’s greatest or most well-known play is probably Hamlet (full title: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark), about the doubts of a Danish prince who lived at Elsinore Castle, which James himself had visited aged 23. First published in 1603, in the first year of James’ reign, this is arguably the quintessential play about the modern human soul. Hamlet is haunted by the vengeful ghost of his murdered father, the king, and revolted by his mother’s marriage to his uncle Claudius, who had killed his father, but Hamlet is paralysed by doubts as to how to apply his own will. The play ends tragically, with all the main characters, the whole Danish royal family, dead, including Hamlet. We can recall in passing that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had invaded England from the Danish peninsula about 1100 years earlier. Act 5, Scene I is one of the most famous scenes, where Hamlet and his friend Horatio chat with a churchyard gravedigger who is digging a grave. The gravedigger hands Hamlet a skull and tells him “this skull has lien you i’ th’ earth three and twenty years”. Hamlet asks whose skull it is and is told it is that of his father’s court jester Yorick. Hamlet holds it up and muses on the vanity and pathos of life. King James’ own father had been murdered when James was only an infant. The exact date when Hamlet was written is unknown but 23 years before publication would take us back to 1580; James had formally become an adult ruler in 1579.

The skull and the grave: the imagery puts us in mind of Golgotha (the place of Christ’s Crucifixion), which means ‘place of the skull(s)’, and after His Crucifixion, His body was placed in a grave belonging to Joseph of Arimathea, a merchant whom tradition connects with journeys to Britain to buy tin. The whole oeuvre of Shakespeare’s plays brings the audience historically to the point in evolution of the solitary individual on this material earth, fallen away from the spiritual world and open to all kinds of errors, crimes and sins, but free, as an individual, to find his or her own path. A dangerous place. Will modern man fall into the grave that is a fixation on materialism? Or will he, through finding his way to Christ, finding his real self, turn away from that which is decayed and rotten and, overcoming doubt, transform his thinking to find the way out of the graveyard of the ancient into a new future?

This is the real ‘Matter’ of England, the problem of England, the choice of those whose native tongue is English: death or resurrection. And because, as Steiner described, the Germanic peoples of northern Europe (who include the English) provide the ‘vanguard’ for humanity in this current historical epoch (from the 15th century until the mid-4th millennium), it is also the problem for humanity in our time. And in this central place in his oeuvre, at this churchyard grave, Shakespeare set the number 23, the number of death and resurrection, or rather, the choice between them, between the 2 and the 3. The number is here associated with humour, with Yorick the jester: humour and death are juxtaposed. The English are known for their humour and comedy; names such as Alice in Wonderland, Charlie Chaplin, Monty Python, Mr Bean, and Ricky Gervais are known around the world. The English are not so well-known for philosophy or religion, and therefore, not really understanding life, or making philosophical sense of it, they take refuge in laughing at it. Hamlet throws the skull back into the grave in disgust: “Pah!” The gravedigger, known in the play  – humorously – as a ‘clown’, is under the mistaken impression that Prince Hamlet has been sent to England. Hamlet asks: “why was he sent to England?” and the clown/gravedigger replies: “Why, because ‘a was mad: ‘a shall recover his wits there; or if ‘a do not, ‘tis no great matter there.” “Why?” asks Hamlet, and the clown replies: “Twill not be seen in him there. There the men are as mad as he”. So, there is the choice: to recover one’s wits in England or not to, and be as ‘mad’ as the English, or as ‘mad’ as the Discordians, who also spoke English. As I dwelt on the mystery and pathos of the graveyard scene, eventually, the significance of the number 23 became clearer to me.

23 in Steiner’s work

I had parted company with mathematics around the age of 9 – largely due to an incongenial maths teacher, I told myself for years. But I later realised it was something much deeper than that; I could not blame Mr Roberts for my bewildering incapacity to calculate. All maths lessons and those others which required maths were torture for me throughout my high school years. Aged 15, I was introduced in maths lessons to binary numbers, a new school subject in the 1960s, and I thought that perhaps I could start again with this new form of mathematics, but no, after a short promising start, the familiar block re-emerged, and I was shut out from the world of maths once again. Perhaps just as well; I might otherwise have gone on to become a computer programmer. And yet, while I could not use maths for calculating and quantifying, I was always strangely drawn to the qualities of numbers, even to the different shapes of them. I was easily able to remember numbers, historical dates, dates of all kinds, and telephone numbers.

After meeting Steiner’s work, I noted that he was an esoteric teacher for 23 years (1902-1925) and 1923, when he entered his 63rd year, was the year of crisis in his life and work, as will be touched on later in this article. In a lecture cycle he gave  in 1914 titled Human Thought, Cosmic Thought(13), I came across a pregnant indication about the number 23. There are, says Steiner, “19 possible worldviews” which people can have: 12 are based on the Zodiac, and 7 on the planets, but there also 3 “tones” which “modify” these 19 worldviews. These 3 tones he calls Theism, Intuitionism and Naturalism, and they relate to thinking that is oriented to the Sun, the Moon and the Earth respectively, for example, people whose thinking is oriented religiously in a sun-like way are Theists; those whose thinking is oriented in an aesthetic way are Intuitionists, while those whose thinking is more scientifically inclined are Naturalists. This makes 22 “world pictures”, but there is one more:  the 23rd, Anthropomorphism: “It occurs only in a single case, when a person, taking all the world-pictures to some extent, restricts himself only to what he can experience on or around or in himself. That is Anthropomorphism. Such a person corresponds to the man who observes the Earth on its own account, independently of its being shone upon by the Sun, the Moon, or anything else. Just as we can consider the Earth for itself alone, so also with regard to world-outlooks we can reckon only with what as men we can find in ourselves.” The Anthropomorphist thus ignores the cosmos, sun, moon, planets. He looks only to himself and to the earth. A rather ‘English’ perspective, one might say… Steiner goes on: “You see, it is not true to talk in terms of one cosmic conception, but of 12 + 7 = 19 + 3 = 22 + 1 = 23 cosmic conceptions which all have their justification. We have twenty-three legitimate names for cosmic conceptions.” Here of course, the point is not the difference between 2 and 3 but the total number of “cosmic conceptions”. Nevertheless, the fact that it adds up to 23 is not without interest, given the number’s macrocosmic and microcosmic dimensions mentioned earlier in this article.

Each of the 12 zodiac signs Steiner associates with a particular form of thinking.  ‘Mathematism’ was one of the 12 forms, and he associated it with … Gemini. Moving from Cancer (Materialism) to Aries (Idealism) via Gemini (Mathematism) and Taurus (Rationalism), Steiner says:(14)

“The most uncompromising materialist would say, ‘No, I do not even calculate, for that would presuppose a superstition — it would imply that I assume that things are ordered by measure and number.’ And anyone who raises himself above this crude materialism will become a mathematical thinker, and will recognize as valid only whatever can be treated mathematically. From this, results a conception of the universe that really admits nothing beyond mathematical formulae. This may be called Mathematism.”

Clearly, the mathematist viewpoint that recognises only number as the basis of the world is something extreme. Yet in our ‘smart’-phone- (i.e. pocket computer)-obsessed, digitalised societies today, increasingly, the way we see the world is made of just two numbers, 1 and 0, the binary electro-numerical basis of our digital technology. In a lecture given on 25.11.1917,(15) Steiner spoke about the polarity of Gemini-Sagittarius, the midsummer and midwinter (or midday and midnight) signs, in contrast to the polarity of Pisces-Virgo, the spring and autumn (or sunrise and sunset) signs (see above). He associated the Gemini-Sagittarius axis with N. America and India respectively and foretold that the binary polarity at work in electromagnetism, which, he said, has its cosmic origin in the constellation of Gemini, would be used by scientists associated with western occult brotherhoods to employ technology that would foster super-materialism. Today, this electro-magnetic binary force is at work in all our modern technology that is all based on sequences of 1s and 0s, which represent on or off states of electrical impulses. We could thus say that our modern, increasingly digitalised civilisation is entirely based on the number 2.

In the lecture cycle (GA 186) which includes the above-mentioned lecture, Steiner speaks about an etheric being called the ahrimanic double,(13) which unites with the bio-electrical nature of our bodies when we are born and remains with it until shortly before we die. This being facilitates ahrimanic impulses in us, and individuals are variously inclined to it depending on their past karma, some people more, some less, and some hardly at all. Through technological devices such as ‘smart’-phones, the ahrimanic double can work on our thoughts, feelings and will impulses to nudge, push or drive us in an ahrimanic direction – that of egotism, fear, contraction, fragmentation and materialism, material satisfaction. When we see people utterly focused on their mobile phones, they are as if possessed, shut off from other people and from the world around them. They have ‘split’ – left their surroundings – and have entered another domain, which we could call a counter-spiritual domain; the domain of Ahriman. This is all related to the number 2, which can be called the number of duality, dualism, splitting and fragmenting.

The negative aspect of the pole associated with Sagittarius, on the other hand, would tend to boost the bestial, animal-like tendencies in us; we are, after all, centaur-like beings; we have a human and an animal nature, and the task of Sagittarius is to assert the human control over the animal element, not in a domineering but in an understanding way. Animals are guided by their instincts, which are powerful spiritual forces that work into them from outside, from their collective group soul beings, which, Steiner describes, exist in the spiritual world. As such, animals are ‘moral automatons’; their behaviour is instinctive and automatic. As moral automatons, they are governed by an outer code; they have no inner sense of freedom as humans have. The centaur-like quality of human nature – part animal, part human – can be used, said Steiner in that same lecture, by “egotistical brotherhoods of the eastern, Indian stream” to mislead eastern Europe (the Slavic peoples), which has the task of preparing the next cultural epoch after our present one, which since the 16th century, has been carried by the Germanic peoples. On their ‘smart’-phones today, young Europeans in both East and West can, for example, first be drawn to eastern notions of “enlightenment” through physical practices such as Yoga and Tantra which work with the human body, but these practices, especially under the influence of unethical spiritual teachers, can degenerate in the West to lower, westernised forms of Tantric sexual practices (the so-called ‘Left-hand Path’) and even to orgiastic activity, rather as soft drugs can lead on to hard drugs.(16)

The dualistic forces inherent in the Gemini-Sagittarius axis would thus be used to boost human egotism in different ways: technological or animalistic. Steiner described how instead of these forces and this midday/midnight axis which represents extremes in the natural cycle (midsummer and midwinter), scientists need to work in their laboratories with the inherently ethical and moral sunrise and sunset forces of the Pisces-Virgo axis, which are of a mediating, in-between nature. The combination of forces working from these two cosmic directions of the Fishes and the Virgin, he said, would serve human healing. These two signs are between the polar extremes of Gemini/Sagittarius and as such represent the mediating balance – a third element between the poles.

869 and 1923

When I was growing up in Chester, two numbers, two dates, regularly impinged themselves upon me. Aged 7-10, I would take the bus into town on Saturdays, get off near the City Hall, look up at the grand Victorian Gothic building and there on the front clearly visible was the year of its construction – 1869. In my teenage years I would cycle to school every day across the suspension bridge over the River Dee from what had once been Roman Chester to what had been a Celtic settlement outside it, the suburban area of my school. I would look up and see the date of the bridge’s opening: 1923. A thousand years before 1869, which incidentally was the year of the First Vatican Council, was the year 869. 8 + 6 + 9 = 23. There is a mysterious connection between 869 and 1923 which I realised not long after I had embarked on the path of Anthroposophy. I soon discovered that 1923 was a critical year in the life of Steiner and in the story of the Anthroposophical movement and Society.

On the first day of that year 1923, the Goetheanum Building, the international centre for Anthroposophy, which Steiner had laboured for 10 years to construct with the help of countless supporters, lay in ruins, after an arson attack on the last night of 1922. But despite this shattering blow, Steiner was not dismayed or defeated. He immediately set to work to reconstruct the Society and the building, and at Christmas 1923, organised a large international gathering later known as “the Christmas Conference”, at which he re-founded the Anthroposophical Society on a completely different basis.

On the second day of that conference, Christmas Day, he laid in the hearts of the 800 or so members of the Society gathered there the foundation stone of the re-founded Society by speaking aloud three verses, which came to be known as the Foundation Stone Meditation. Its three multi-layered verses were addressed to the willing, feeling, and thinking of the human soul. With this act, Steiner restored to Europe, to the world, and to Christians throughout the world something vital that had been lost in the 9th century, specifically in the year 869/70: the Trichotomy, the understanding of the threefold nature of the human being as a being of body, soul and spirit. He had been speaking since at least 1917 of the world-historical importance of the 8th Ecumenical Council(17) at Constantinople, (5 October 869 – 28 February 870), an importance that had gone unnoticed by Christians in the West for over a thousand years, and at the Christmas Conference of 1923 he brought six years of speaking about the threefolding of the human being and of society to a culmination by openly restoring the Trichotomy in place of the human Dichotomy that had been imposed by the Church in the Council of 869-870. For several years before 1923, he had made the radical claim that at the Council of 869, the human spirit had been “abolished”. By this, he meant that the Church had proclaimed a dogma at that Council with regard to the understanding of what a human being is that reduced the human being from a threefold entity of body, soul and spirit to a twofold entity of body and soul only. This “abolition of the spirit”, as he called it, was to have enormous consequences for the whole of western civilisation from the 9th century onwards. It meant that no longer were Christians allowed to seek their own way to God through their own individual spirit; henceforth, they were supposed to depend for salvation on the dogmas of the Church and the words of the Church authorities.

However, if we look at the 27 canons (church laws) promulgated by the Council of 869-870, we find no such declaration of the “abolition of the spirit”. Instead, it was deviously concealed in the text of Canon XI as part of an attack on a particular doctrine alleged to have been taught by Patriarch Photios of Constantinople, who was not even named in the canon. Indeed, the very purpose of convening the Council had been to condemn Photios, and so it is sometimes known as the ‘Anti-Photian Council’. The doctrine anathematised in Canon XI was known as the doctrine of the ‘twin, or two, souls’, which referred to the two souls that the doctrine claimed human beings have: one which looks to the needs of the body and one which looks to the human being’s higher, spiritual needs.

This notion of ‘the two souls’ was a last remnant of the older, threefold teaching from the New Testament, that of the pneuma (spirit) psyché (soul) and the soma or sarx (body), the ‘higher’ of the two souls being seen as the pneuma. The early Greek Church Fathers had of course known of and taught the human Trichotomy, but in its later battles against those it called ‘heretics’, the Church, especially in the Latin West, lost sight of it and dropped the pneuma altogether, merging spiritus into anima, which resulted in the human Dichotomy of body (corpus) and soul (anima) only. The anathema at the Council of 869/70 against the teaching of the two souls was the effort of Rome’s representatives at the Council to do away with the final remnant of Trichotomy by insisting that a human being has only one soul, which, they insisted, is a “rational and intellectual soul”. The estrangement between the eastern and western Churches that was much increased in 869-70 by the disagreement over Photios, a highly educated Patriarch who stood up against Rome’s claims to primacy, culminated in 1054 with the Great Schism(18) between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches, when the Roman papal legate laid a ban of excommunication upon the altar of the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia (the Holy Spirit, see pic. left), and the two confessions then stopped communicating with each other – a schism which even today is not yet properly healed. It was also a schism between the two cultures, the Greek and the Latin, which dominated the entire Greco-Roman epoch from the founding of Rome in the 8th cent. BC (753) to the Fall of Constantinople in the 15th century AD (1453).(19)

Mysterious arithmetic

Mysterious in this context is also the arithmetical fact that not only does 8 + 6 + 9 = 23, as mentioned earlier, but there are 54 years (6 x 9) between those two dates in the Chester years of my youth, 1869 and 1923, and I noted that 869 + 1054 (the year of the Great Schism)= 1923, which was the year of the existential crisis and resurrection of the Anthroposophical Society. Exactly 1000 years after the 8th Ecumenical Council of 869-870 (accepted as ecumenical by the Roman Catholic Church, but not recognised by the Orthodox confessions) was the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), at which the doctrine of Papal Infallibility was defined and proclaimed. In the year 869 in the 9th century, we see the numbers 6 and 9. In the year 1054 in the 11th century, just after the beginning of the second millennium, we see the numbers 6 and 9 in a different way: 6 x 9 = 54. So the year 1869 that was 1000 years after the Council of 869 is numerically related to the year of the Council of 869-870, to the year of the Great Schism of East and West  (1054) and to the year 1923, when, after the ‘crucifixion’ of the Anthroposophical movement,   Steiner ‘resurrected’ the Anthroposophical Society and ‘restored’ the threefold image of Man.

In December 1923, at the Christmas Conference in Dornach, Switzerland,  in the “Goetheanum” building he had designed (above), Steiner not only refounded the Anthroposophical Society but did so specifically on the basis – the Foundation Stone Meditation – of Trichotomy, the threefold image of Man, and in doing so, restored the Trichotomy to western culture, thus signifying that the time to begin to draw back the heavy  veil that had closed off the individual spirit since 869 had now arrived. It was the historical moment for the announcement of the modern spiritual freedom of the individual in the face of traditional authorities that had sought to repress and control that freedom, and it was immediately confronted by new, modern forms of authoritarianism – Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism – that sought to do the same. Those three new forms of authoritarianism can be said to be based on the numbers 1 and 2 – the number 1 because they were all monolithic and insisted on commanding the whole of society and culture and demanding the full subservience of every individual, and the number 2 because they were all based on the materialistic and dualistic natural science (or their interpretation thereof) that had emerged in the West since the 17th century, the science that had divorced the reality of the inner human being from the reality of outer nature by separating the scientist’s inner life from the object of his enquiry.

In passing, it may be noted that two of the first three individuals to whom Steiner taught the fundamentals of threefold social thinking in the summer of 1917 were born in 1869. These were Count Otto Lerchenfeld (1869-1938), a Bavarian, who was the first to ask Steiner how the First World War could be ended in an honourable way on the basis of a true Central European impulse – the question that first enabled Steiner to speak about social threefolding – and the Austrian Count Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz (1869-1945), one of Steiner’s closest pupils and a man deeply concerned with East-West issues, the future of Europe, and the threefold social impulse. He was born in Prague, the very centre of Europe, and did much to illuminate and expose the contemporary activities of both Freemasons and Jesuits.(20) The third in this honourable trio was Walter Johannes Stein (1891-1957), who was then an army officer from Vienna.

Hexagram 23

If we extend the upper lefthand side of the figure 8, we make the figure 6 and if we extend the lower righthand side of the figure 8, we make the figure 9. The 6 (2 x 3) and the 9 (3 x 3) would thus be included in the figure 8. The well-known ancient Chinese Yin-Yang symbol  represented a profound form of philosophical dualism and is composed of shapes which resemble the figures 6 and 9 and a form of it (left) was used as the symbol of the Technocracy movement in America in the 1930s. Technocrats believed that electricity – a binary force – was the way of the future and that society should be governed scientifically by technocrats (designers and engineers). The Yin-Yang philosophy was merged in China about 2300 years ago(21) with a much older divinatory system called the I Ching (Book of Changes). This system of foretelling the future consists of 64 hexagrams (Nb. 8 x 8), each of which has 6 horizontal lines, either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang). Each hexagram has profound multi-layered meanings that are rooted in concrete natural events or actions. Hexagram 23 (left), for example, is named 剝 (bō or pō), which means “splitting” in the sense of stripping, peeling, or removing that which is unusable or outmoded, such as a rice husk, or a building. The outer (upper) trigram means ‘bound’ in the way a mountain is both a boundary of something and marks a new beginning, e.g. a boundary between countries, while the inner (lower) trigram  means field, which offers up produce. The image is of a still mountain resting upon the earth.

Here is the I Ching scholar Richard Wilhelm’s interpretation of this hexagram: “the dark (yin broken) lines are about to mount upward and overthrow the last firm, light (yang) line by exerting a disintegrating influence upon it” [recall the Discordians!] and “The inferior forces overcome what is superior not by direct means, but by undermining it gradually and imperceptibly, so that it finally collapses. ….the hexagram presents the image of a house, the top line being the roof, and because the roof is being shattered, the house collapses….the yin power pushes up ever more powerfully and is about to supplant the yang power altogether.” The divinatory advice in this case is that lower elements are rising inexorably and “it is not favourable for the superior man to undertake anything” in such circumstances. “One should submit to the bad time and remain quiet [as] it is impossible to counteract these conditions of the time”. “The mountain rests upon the earth. When it is steep and narrow, lacking a broad base, it must topple over. Its position is strong only when it rises out of the earth broad and great, not proud and steep.” Rulers therefore – and the I Ching was especially directed at rulers – “should be generous and benevolent, like the earth that carries all. Then they will make their position as a secure as a mountain is in its tranquillity.” The concluding line of the advice means that when the splitting apart “has reached its end and misfortune has spent itself, better times return. The seed of the good remains … and when the fruit falls to the ground …. the good sprouts anew from its seed. The superior man again attains influence and effectiveness, but the inferior man’s wickedness is visited upon himself. His house is split apart. A law of nature is at work here. Evil is not destructive to the good alone but inevitably destroys itself as well. For evil, which lives solely by negation, cannot continue to exist on its own strength alone.”(22)

The 2 and the 3

So, we see that Hexagram 23 means that a split, a separation must take place. This can be seen as something negative – splits usually are seen that way – but it can also be necessary and inevitable, as the hexagram says, and can result in a new beginning and new growth. If we focus on the 2, we focus on the split; if we focus on the 3, we focus on the new. It is like Crucifixion and Resurrection. 23 is of course 2 x 10 and 3 x 1. The larger 2 x 10 seems superior to the smaller 3 x 1.  If we see the 2 over the 3, as in two thirds ⅔, then the two is shown as above or superior to the three, but if we see the number horizontally, from left to right, then we can see the 2 giving way to the 3, being succeeded by the 3. In the pentagram, the 3 should be above, not below. Steiner spoke of the number 5 (2 + 3) as the number of evil,(23) because the godhead, he said, created the human being with a physical body, an etheric body (of life forces), an astral body (of feelings) and an ego (a “sleeping seed of the will”) i.e. a fourfold being, but when the seed of the fifth element, the spirit self (Geistselbst) was added, human beings were no longer mere creatures of the divine, they were now able to rebel against the divine, become free to do their own will, fall into error and thus do evil. The number 5 (2 + 3) is thus that of the creative individual between good and evil. Ernst Bindel, in his fascinating book Die geistigen Grundlagen der Zahlen (The Spiritual Basis of Numbers) (4th ed., 1980) points out that Steiner also regarded 5 as the number of crisis; this word comes from the Greek verb krinein, to separate, or one could say, discriminate between two things, as in separate the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats (as in the Gospel of Matthew 25:32). From this viewpoint, it is therefore no accident that in our modern age, which Steiner called the 5th Post-Atlantean Epoch, since the 15th century, the English-speaking peoples have played such a prominent role. For not only are they, according to Steiner, the pre-eminent people of the Consciousness Soul (the last of the three soul elements),(24) which it is the task of humanity as a whole to develop in this epoch, the age of the individual’s rediscovery of the spirit, they have also initiated the modern world into the age of radical materialism through the Industrial Revolution, which began in England the process of creating, from the subterranean realms of the earth  a new species of beings – the machines. Furthermore, the number 23 has played a particular role in the history of the English people, out of whom the other English-speaking peoples developed. We have seen this with King James I, the 23rd monarch since the Norman Conquest in 1066, in whose reign England’s global role can be said to have begun in East and West, and with Shakespeare, who was supposedly born and died on 23 April,(25) which is also St. George’s Day, England’s national day and in Psalm 23 in the Old Testament – the most beloved and well-known Psalm among the English-speaking peoples since King James’ time. The psalm speaks of confidence in the beneficent guidance of God, despite the evils and enemies that may confront one.

Conclusion: 23 as the number of choice

To reiterate, 23 is the number of choice in this modern age when humanity is challenged to take responsibility for itself and for its planetary home, which happens, as mentioned earlier, to be angled at 23° to the plane of its orbit round the Sun. 2 is the number of materialism and dualism; 3 is the way beyond them. We can either see 23 as: 2 comes before 3, i.e. is superior to 3 – this is the negative and sinister aspect of 23 which is largely dominant in popular culture, as in Winston Churchill’s V for Victory sign (two fingers up, three down)(26) and ultimately in the inverted pentagram of black magic -  or we can see 23 as moving on from 2 to 3, from duality to threefoldness.

The choice is between crucifixion on the twofold cross of materialism if we opt to sink ever further into materialism and self-destruction -  and resurrection in the rediscovery of our spiritual nature as threefold beings of body, soul and spirit. This rediscovery leads to affirmation of our individuality and freedom, on the threefold basis of which we can build a new sense of community free of ancient blood ties, a new society that reflects our modern human reality.  This is why Steiner’s ideas about social threefolding are so important.(27) They point to the new way forward for society in this third millennium, because a threefold society in which the three spheres of culture and research, law and politics, and economic life (industry, agriculture and commerce) are disentangled, clearly separated and yet harmoniously interrelated with the real movement of the age.

The second Christian millennium was marked by a strong dualism in many fields of human life, not least in philosophy, science, politics and economics, and this dualism culminated in the 1990s in the World Wide Web – WWW: 23-23-23, W being the 23rd letter of the alphabet. This technological web, which has been conjured up and spun around us all so quickly these past 30 years, as if by some wizard, Harry Potter-like, cannot be allowed to dominate our lives in the third millennium. For this millennium, we need fundamentally new social thinking.

Such thinking is clearly beyond the ‘high priests’ and would-be ‘Illuminati’ aristocrats of the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations and the Bank of International Settlements, with their much touted “Agenda 2030” – an authoritarian, technocratic and digitalised vision of an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)-driven surveillance dystopia, which is continually represented by the mainstream media as inevitable. Those elitist ‘high priests’ are merely recycling the dualism of the last millennium and the collectivist monism of the millennia before that, dressed up in modern garb, in their top-down, patrician prescriptions for a neo-feudal order, a one world government by corporate elites and a passive global populace, hooked on benefits, drugs, cheap chemicalised food and entertainment ‘circuses’, and cowed into compliance by technological ‘magic’. The new social thinking that we urgently need today is based on a thoroughgoing threefold approach to society, such as is found in Steiner’s ideas about social threefolding. At its heart is the threefold picture of the human being. The first requirement here is the freeing of the cultural sphere from the joint grip of the State and of Big Business so that education, medicine, religion, philosophy, jurisprudence and artistic and scientific research are not subjected to dictates and influence from the political and economic spheres. This emancipation of the individual human spirit in the West, fettered since the dogma of the Council of 869, is now essential if we are to move on from crucifixion on the twofold cross to resurrection in a threefold society.

Endnotes

1 From The Principia Discordia or, How I Found the Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her by Malaclypse the Younger (aka Greg Hill) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Principia_Discordia#THE_LAW_OF_FIVES

2 Another movie about 23, German this time, called simply “23”, was made in 1998 (Nb. 3 x 666). This was based on supposedly a true Cold War spy drama from the 1980s; the real life protagonist died on 23 May 1989, a presumed suicide.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_(film)

3 The angle of the Earth’s axial tilt varies with respect to the plane of the Earth’s orbit. These variations take approximately 41,000 years to move between a tilt of 22.1° and 24.5° and back again.

4  James was also King James VI of Scotland from 1567-1625, so is also known as King James VI and I. But here I focus on him as King of England because England, as the much wealthier country, was the one that embarked in his reign on its global endeavours.

5 18.7.1916 Collected Works GA 169.

6 Lecture 15.1.1917 Collected Works GA 174, in The Karma of Untruthfulness, Vol 2.

7 As to who this source may have been, see Who Wrote Bacon?: William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and James I, a Mystery of the Twenty-first Century  (2004) by Richard Ramsbotham.

8 See n. 7.

9 Also the revised Book of Common Prayer (1604).

10 1914, Collected Works GA 151.

11 (26.6.1908, GA 104)

12 They were made for the Munich Congress of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, held in 1907. Steiner began to develop the artistic impulse in his work and teaching at that time, when he was still in the Theosophical Society, which he left at the end of 1912 and helped to form the Anthroposophical Society in early 1913.

13 https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA151/English/RSP1961/19140121p01.html  21 Jan. 1914, Berlin, Collected Works GA 151.

14 Collected Works GA 186.

15 Ahrimanic: the adjective from Ahriman, the name Steiner gave – from the ancient Persian Spirit of Lies and Darkness – to the powerful spiritual being who, amongst other things, inspires materialism and the ideas behind our modern electromagnetic and electronic technology.

16 A number of ‘spiritual masters’ in the Tibetan or Indian Tantric traditions have been found over the past several decades to have been sexually exploiting or abusing their followers.

17 Also known as the 4th Council of Constantinople, as the Orthodox tradition does not recognise this Council as ecumenical. It was held from 5 October 869 to 28 February 870.

18 Another factor in the split was the disagreement over the meaning of the filioque (“and the Son”) clause relating to the definition of the Holy Spirit: did it proceed from the Son as well as the Father? The West said yes, the East said no.

19 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, who were Muslims. The Muslim Holy Book, the Qur’an, was revealed over a total of 23 years (609-632 AD) to the Prophet Muhammed.

20 See Thomas H. Meyer, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz – A European (Temple Lodge, 2014).

21 The time of the great philosopher, scholar and spiritual writer, Zou Yan, 305-240 BC.

22 See R. Wilhelm, The I Ching or Book of Changes (3rd ed. 1968), pp.93-96.

23 Lecture of 15.9.1907, Stuttgart.

24 The Self expresses itself over the course of millennia of historical time, through the three aspects of the soul: Sentient Soul, Intellectual/Mind Soul, Consciousness Soul. These correspond to feeling, thinking and willing respectively. See R. Steiner, Theosophy (1904)

25 He certainly died on 23 April; his birth on 23 April is anecdotal; there is no firm proof of it, but clearly there was a wish that he should have been born and died on the same day, which points to the significance of that date in the minds of the English.

26 Churchill was all his life a man of war and imperial domination. The only member of the UK Cabinet in both world wars, he played a major part in starting and perpetuating those wars.

27 See R. Steiner, Toward Renewal, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999, The Social Future, Anthroposophic Press, 1972, and S.E. Usher ed., Rudolf Steiner’s Social and Political Science,  Sophia Books (Rudolf Steiner Press), 2003.

The lead illustration above is that of the Archangel Uriel, the Archangel of midsummer.

Terry Boardman April 2023

If we contemplate the number 23, we can recall that the most famous Psalm in the Bible – Psalm 23 – speaks of man’s confidence in his trust in God’s support. The Koran was revealed to Mohammed over a period of 23 years. Biologists will tell us that normal human sex cells have 23 chromosomes, and astronomers will re­mind us that the earth is tilted at an angle of about 23 degrees to the Sun (actually 23.5). Without that tilting at 23 degrees, the earth’s seasons and hence its human cultures would be totally different from what they are. So both at the microcosmic level of the cell and at the macrocosmic level of the Earth, which is a giant ‘cell’ in itself, the number 23 – the binary and the triad – is a crucial key in the incarnation of the human spirit on the material plane. The binary, with its characteristic feature of division, is the Ur-principle, the blueprint of material reality. In the course of time the ‘matter-realisa­tion’ of that blueprint has led to a materialistic rejection in human consciousness of any non-material reality at all. The triad is that which overcomes this divisive ma­terialism and reconnects human consciousness with the spiritual world, the visible with the invisible. At Easter we can think of the binary as the necessary crucifixion of spirit in ‘matter’ and of the triad as the resurrection of the spirit which gives meaning to the relation of spirit to ‘matter’, and at midsummer we can think of Rudolf Steiner’s beautiful evocation of the triune St John Imag­ination¹ with its picture of the Christ between the Spirit Father above and the Earth Mother below. Because the triad has this healing capacity, ultimately exemplified in the Mystery of Golgotha, this is also why Rudolf Steiner’s threefold social impulse is so important to overcome the socio-economic crisis of the modern age, especially in the current context of worsening US-China relations. I shall return to this later in this article.

The triad and the ninth century

As soon as he became an esoteric teacher in 1902 (which he remained until his death, 23 years later), Rudolf Stein­er made clear from the beginning that his would be the path of Christian esotericism rather than one that fo­cused more on Indian teachings, as in the Theosophy of Annie Besant, centred at Adyar in India. Moreover, Steiner’s emphasis on the Rosicrucian heritage of Central Europe, with its alchemical focus on the triad of salt, mercury and sulphur, meant that a strong threefold, Trinitarian impulse lay at the centre of his teaching and his activity. His life drama reached a peak when in the years 1917-1922 he found himself within a world war in which Central Europe was fighting against the East and the West and in which he personally was increas­ingly drawn into the centre of social and international events. Indeed, by 1914 he was already in a personal relationship with Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of the General Staff, who was in command of all German armies on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. After Moltke died in June 1916, Steiner remained in spiritual contact with his individuality for seven years, the only case in his life of which this is known. Steiner realised that von Moltke had previously incarnated as Pope Nicholas I in the ninth century, whose historic task it had been in that incarnation to clearly separate Eastern and Western Christianity. In the 20th century it had been his will to reunite East and West, but tragically, he found himself having to lead the fight against them both. From 1916 onwards, Steiner drew attention to the historical consequences of the 8th Ecumenical Council of the Church in Constantinople which took place in the ninth century (869). The Council’s anathemas had effectively reduced the Trichotomy of the human being (body, soul, spirit) to a Dichotomy (body and soul only). This focus on the binary nature of the human being had laid the theological and philosophical basis for the bi­nary nature of natural science and materialistic thought that later emerged in the 17th century, notably through the influence of the writings of Francis Bacon and Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1582-1648), the ‘father’ of Deism. Throughout his own activities, Steiner urged the modern culture of western civilisation, in effect, to rediscover the Trinity, the essence of the human, the social and the cosmic triad, – or rather, to understand it for the first time² – through the reclaiming of the indi­vidual spirit that could find its own path to the divine. The war itself, he showed, was the consequence of the materialism that had resulted from the errors of the Church in 869, the denial of the individual spirit and the insistence on following the authority and dogmas of the Church. That Council of 869-70 had led first to the Great Schism of 1054 between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches: both Christianity and European culture now appeared to be irrevocably split. A further split occurred with the Reformation, and then came more splits between the adherents of the Reformation. The sickness that had first manifested in the spiritual or theological sphere spread in later centuries to the politi­cal and economic spheres, in revolutions, class conflict, and economic rivalries between nations. Out of these social poisons had come the Great War. Materialism, fear of the spirit, was the great matrix of the war. Capitalism, imperialism, socialism, communism, nationalism and fascism – all were born of that matrix.

Building on his esoteric Christian understanding of the threefold nature of Man (body, soul, spirit), Steiner pointed to the need for a new social reformation in the modern world, which would heal the sickness that had resulted from those deeds of 869-70. The threefolding of society into autonomous but interrelating spheres of economy, politics and culture, which he energetically advocated from 1917, first to the elites, through personal contacts, and then, when the elites ignored him, to the masses of the people in 1919, represented the undoing of the deed of 869-70, and the restoration of the threefold nature of both Man and society. The culmination of Ru­dolf Steiner’s restorative deed for the culture of the West came at the Christmas Conference on 25 December 1923 with his speaking of the Foundation Stone meditation for the first time.

Lotharingia (Middle Francia) 855-869

Lotharingia (yellow)
Italy (pink)
East Francia (blue)
West Francia (grey)
Provence (violet)

The numbers in the date 869 add up to 23. The dates 869 + 1054, when added together, come to 1923. Even the arithmetic of history testifies to the reality of Rudolf Steiner’s deed in that year when he refounded the Anthroposophical Society at the Christmas Conference in Dornach, Switzerland on the esoteric basis of the threefold Foundation Stone meditation  From the time of the Coun­cil of 869, dualism came to dominate European culture. This was already reflected politically in the 9th century when Lotharingia (or Middle Francia) was partitioned in 869-70 between the kings of East Francia and West Francia.³ Once again, we see the same dualistic gesture in 869-70: in the East, at Constantinople, a spiritual triad (body-soul-spirit) was reduced theologically to a bina­ry (body and soul only)  at the 8th Ecumenical Council, while in the West, in Frankia, a triad was reduced to a binary politically by the Treaty of Mersen. Rudolf Steiner re­stored the triad to European culture through his work 1917-1923, both philosophically and esoterically in the Foundation Stone, and socially in his advocacy of social threefolding.

The “Great Reset”?

But although the seed of social threefolding was suc­cessfully planted in 1919-1922, it did not grow at that time. The historical moment for it was missed; the An­throposophical movement was not strong and resolute enough to carry it forward; the receptivity of the public to it proved insufficient. There was too much willingness across the political spectrum to allow the unitary State – whether of the twofold order, the twofold, adversarial party system in capitalist countries, or of the ‘onefold order’ – fascist or communist – to deal with the many problems thrown up by the consequences of the war. The historical moment, Steiner said, would not return for a hundred years, after which “a window of the spiritual world would open” to create another opportunity for it.⁴ Not a few Anthroposophers think that time may be now.

And what are we seeing now, in the wake of COV­ID-19? In fact, we are seeing another attempt to ‘reboot’ a onefold order, to create a ‘new’ social consensus under the umbrella of the unitary State. This is being done by appealing to wartime rhetoric of life and death, “fighting the deadly enemy” and national and personal survival – all of which obliges us to “pull together”, we are told, and “do our civic duty” as in wartime⁵, dutifully and compliantly following the dictates of the State. We are told that this crisis will “bring us all together”, make us “stronger together”, “leave no-one behind”, in order to bring about the “New Green Deal” and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, setting up carbon, SARS-CoV-2, China and “white supremacy” as the new scapegoats and enemies to be defeated – objects of fear and hate, in effect, against which all are urged to rally. Since 2016, the era of Trump and Brexit, the media made endless allusions to the 1930s; now, it would seem, we are to believe that we have advanced into the 1940s and are fighting our own version of World War II on the four above-mentioned fronts.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), one of the world’s main breeding stations of globalist capitalism, declares on its website⁶ the need for a “Great Reset”, as if it be­lieves that capitalism must rapidly be transformed into some grand, A.I.-driven, green, egalitarian, socio-eco­nomic paradise inspired by such as Greta Thunberg, Jeff Bezos, and the Black Lives Matter and LGBTQIA+ movements. Establishment media throughout the West echo the WEF’s call; the BBC in Britain promotes the same agenda through its “Rethink” project – which in fact chimes with UN Agenda 21 and its subset, Agenda 2030. Launched on 21 June, the BBC’s “Rethink” project reaches right across the entire BBC programme sched­ules and is obviously designed to ‘nudge’ the populace in the direction that the WEF and the global elite want the world to move. The emphasis is emphatically col­lective – everyone must be included – , conforming to the global elite’s will mediated through the increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic actions of national State governments and through the censorious, freedom-de­nying behaviours of corporate tech companies such as facebook and Google, which are turning the Internet into a glitzier, more subtle version of the controlled and censored media of the Cold War Communist bloc. What is emerging is not only a massive increase in the power of the State through this COVID ‘crisis’ but especially in the cultural sphere, where the ‘identity wars’ are the fiercest, a one-pattern society and culture is developing where only opinions within a very narrow range are tolerated. Any attempt to express dissenting views will have severe legal and/or economic consequences. And all of this is being done in the name of “equality”, “inclusivity”, “diversity”, “combating ‘hate’” and of course, uphold­ing “the science”, a science that is rapidly becoming as dogmatic as the theology of the mediaeval cardinals. Scientists who dissent from the climate change or COV­ID-19 or vaccination orthodoxy are excluded, ignored, or slandered.⁷ “The science” is uniform. Everyone must accept it and conform. No-one must dare to dissent, and everyone will be expected to accept the anti-CoV-2 vac­cine when it arrives, most probably later this year from a British or American laboratory. Otherwise, such vaccine dissenters are likely to be branded selfish ‘domestic ter­rorists’ who are endangering the health of the nation. There will no doubt be calls for them to be excluded from travel and employment opportunities. In short, they will lose some of their civil and human rights, as was the case with religious Dissenters in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. In those days Protestant Dissenters and Catholics were held to endanger and undermine the spiritual health of the nation. This new uniformity will be policed by facial recognition surveillance technol­ogy and probably some form of smartphone-mediated social credit system, as in China, though probably not so blatant, so as to preserve the appearance of democ­racy. The WEF – ostensibly a private organisation – and the US Department of Homeland Security – an arm of government - have already collaborated to produce such a system⁸, which is likely to be rolled out next year.

War drums? Or simply ‘decoupling’ from China?

It is a great irony that all this centralised control and cen­sorship is happening in the West precisely when western elites are using the COVID-19 ‘pandemonium’ to turn against China and identify it as an ‘enemy’ and a ‘threat’. This is happening across the so-called left-right divide, from Donald Trump to Nancy Pelosi, from The Economist to the Murdoch Press, from the so-called quality Press to the tabloids, from Die Welt to Das Bild. “During the recent Munich Security Conference, [Pelosi] replied to [the] question whether she essentially agreed with Trump’s China policy without hesitation and to the surprise of the audience: “Yes.” Pelosi described China as a “government that does not serve our values” and spoke of an “authoritarian form of aggression.” Mathias Döpfner recently wrote in the Ger­man paper Die Welt am Sonntag in an article titled “We have to choose”: “Germany and Europe, together with the USA, should decide to consistently disconnect from China. How this should be structured is one of the most exciting political questions of the future. …The corona recession marks a …unique opportunity to correct a mistake…. In the end, everything is very simple: what future do we want for Europe: an alliance with an imperfect democracy or with a perfect dictatorship? The decision should actually be easy for us. It’s more than money. It is about our freedom, about Article 1, the most beautiful term that has ever been in a legal text: human dignity.”⁹

The Henry Jackson Society (HJS), one of many elite transatlantic think-tanks, and very hawkish on foreign policy, has identified the key areas in which the 5 An­glosphere countries known as the “Five Eyes” (US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada), are overly dependent on China. The HJS advocates active economic ‘decou­pling’ from China as well as a de facto western contain­ment policy towards China. The anti-Chinese rhetoric has greatly stepped up in 2020 with COVID-19 being labelled in rightwing circles as a ‘Chinese virus’ or ‘the Wuhan virus’.

This completely overlooks the fact that the World Health Organisation (WHO) and western governments failed to do their own due diligence with regard to the alleged seriousness of COVID-19. There was no scien­tific need for them to overreact as they did; a number of western epidemiologists and other medical special­ists pointed out¹⁰ in March and April that the virus was not essentially worse than previous seasonal influenza epidemics and would go through a similar process of growth and decline, which it has done. In fact, the an­ti-China rhetoric had been building up for several years. The beginning of China’s colossal “One Belt, One Road” Eurasian transport infrastructure and trade project in 2013 and the signing of the huge 30-year Russia-Chi­na natural gas deal in 2014 were key milestones. From that period onward, talk of a new Cold War began to proliferate in western media, as well as comparisons of the US-China relationship with that between the British and German empires in the decade before the First World War in terms of relations between a rising and an established or declining Power. In those days, German exporters and businessmen were outmanoeu­vring the British even within Britain’s own Empire, so the British resorted to war to redress the balance – first the Boer War (1899-1902), to prevent S. Africa’s gold and diamond mines falling into German hands, and then the two world wars (1914-45)¹¹, to attempt to suppress German competition substantially and bring Germany itself under Anglosphere control.

Today, concerned about Anglosphere inability to compete economically with China in Eurasia, Africa and Latin America, Anglosphere elites are again banging the war drums. Last year, the Rand Corporation in the USA carried out a complex US vs Russia + China war­game simulation assuming war 10-20 years from now, which did not turn out at all well for the US. The lesson the establishment media will no doubt draw from this is that the US needs to further upgrade and expand its military spending, already by far the world’s largest. The author of the RAND report wrote that “$24 billion a year for the next five years would be a good expenditure” to prepare the military for World War III.¹² One can recall Rudolf Steiner speaking of western brotherhoods already planning in the 1890s for a great European war in the near future.¹³

Anthroposophers should not be surprised to see the elites of America and China squaring off against each other at this time, since we are living almost 2000 years after the Mystery of Golgotha, the anniversary years of which will come in 2030-2033 at a time when the mani­festation of Ahriman in human form – the incarnation of Ahriman¹⁴ – can be expected. For China and America are the two cultures in which, according to Rudolf Steiner, the incarnations of Lucifer (c.3000 BC) and Ahriman (very early 3rd millennium AD) historically occur. And in this 21st century, when all of us as mankind, like a human individual aged 21, are to take responsibility for ourselves and the planet, when we are challenged to find and recognise the Christ Being as the Ego of man­kind, Lucifer and Ahriman combine to try to prevent mankind from assuming that responsibility in the right way, that is, in the sense of human freedom. They seek instead, to use the old ways, albeit dressed up in modern rhetoric and modern technology. They seek to have us guided, nudged, led and controlled like sheep by oligar­chical shepherds at the WEF, the WHO and the Chinese Communist Party. They provide, in short, the resistance mankind needs to find its freedom and responsibility.

No surprise then, to see that both China and America were involved in the COVID-19 phenomenon: in the In­ternational Military Games at Wuhan in October 2019; at the Event 201 coronavirus simulation held at Johns Hopkins University in New York at the same time; in the murky financial connections between the US and the Wuhan Institute of Virology – a US$3.7 million research grant to that Wuhan Institute in 2015¹⁵ approved by Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and current­ly the leading medical specialist in the US Coronavirus Task Force; in the close relations between Bill Gates and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: the WHO overreacted to the Chinese and Italian over­reactions to the virus and declared a global pandemic on 11 March. This worked very much in the vaccination interests of the WHO’s second largest donor at the time (now the largest since President Trump announced the cancellation of US funding for the WHO in April), name­ly, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with which Tedros Adhanom has had a close relationship since his time as Minister of Health in Ethiopia 2005-2012. The WHO and many governments around the world influ­enced by the WHO have allowed themselves to be overly affected by the overreaction of the Chinese government to COVID-19 and as a result, lockdowns have been im­posed around the world with all the severely damaging consequences these lockdowns have been having on economies and on the physical and mental health of millions. Mankind has been subjected to a colossal act of vandalism, all to defeat a virus dubbed “terrible”, “dead­ly”, “brutal”, “killer” “plague” by the media. It is a virus which, by itself, has in fact accounted for numbers of deaths on a par with seasonal flu. The American Centers for Disease Control estimated that 46,000 – 95,000 Amer­icans died of influenza during the 2017-18 flu season. At the time of writing, there have been 128,000 deaths in the USA of people with COVID-19¹⁶, i.e. who tested pos­itive for the SARS-Cov-2 virus, but that does not mean they died of COVID-19 itself. Indeed, there has been evi­dence of much manipulation of COVID-19 data to inflate the numbers of deaths due to COVID-19.¹⁷

In 1913 many intelligent people believed that there would be no war between Britain and Germany because the two countries had too many interwoven economic ties and furthermore, because they were both advanced European countries whose educated classes shared many cultural values and habits. One year later, this belief was shown to have been illusory. Yet many people make simi­lar arguments today about the US and China: their econ­omies are too interdependent; they are both ‘mature’ states; they will not risk war in the age of nuclear weap­ons etc. But to repeat, these are the very two cultures of the incarnations of the spiritually polar beings, Lucifer and Ahriman. Billions of dollars have been spent over the decades by US and Chinese institutions and govern­ments in order to ‘understand’ each other’s culture and society better, but if this is done primarily with a view to benefitting materially from the other, and without taking a spiritual view of life into account, it will have no good result, as Rudolf Steiner pointed out in 1922 on the eve of the Washington Conference between the USA, Britain and Japan: “The Asiatic peoples will meet the West with understanding if the West can offer them thoughts of a universal humanity, thoughts that indicate what Man is in the whole universal order and how a social life may be achieved in conformity with what Man is. When the peoples in the East hear that the West has fresh knowledge on those very subjects of which their ancient traditions tell and for the renewal of which they themselves are vaguely striving, then will the way be open for mutual understanding and coopera­tion. If, however, we persist in regarding the infusion of such knowledge into public activity as a fantastic dream of the unpractical, then in the end the East will wage war upon the West, however much they may converse about the beauties of disarmament.”¹⁸ Twenty years later, in the battles in the Pacific, the truth of Rudolf Steiner’s words was very starkly borne out. The growing US-China tensions of the past ten years have shown that the situation between the two countries is only getting worse. Many believe that a state of undeclared cold war already exists between them and that it is only a matter of time before the ‘cold’ becomes ‘hot’. There are various geographical ‘hotspot buttons’ around China that the US is capable of pressing: Tibet, the borders of India, the South China Sea islands, Hong Kong, Taiwan, N. Korea, and relations with Japan.

The Threefold solution: for East-West peace and cooperation

What could serve to avert such a conflict between the collectivist People’s Republic of China and the individ­ualistic USA? A triadic solution, namely, the threefold social organism, which has both collectivist and indi­vidualistic elements within it, would mitigate the perni­cious effects of the extremes of both systems. It does not do away with the essence of capitalism, but recognises the role of the individual in starting economic activity. However, it asserts that the purpose of the economic sphere is to produce goods from the bounty of nature, which is cherished and protected – goods that will serve others; the purpose is not the maximisation of profit for oneself, one’s family or even one’s country. It is to serve other human beings all over the world, as in the mod­ern age the whole world is one interdependent economic organism, although to begin with, economic activity usually starts in one’s own locale. Threefolding does not subordinate any of the three spheres of society (culture, politics, economy) to the other two, and does not seek to mix up all three. On the contrary, it gives autonomy to all three in their own spheres, while enabling them at the same time to interrelate, much as the three physio­logical systems of the human body (nerves, circulation and metabolism) are also separate but interrelate and support each other. The State therefore must not run the economy or the cultural sphere; if it tries to, it will either fail, out of incompetence in those spheres, or it will come into conflict with other States that also presume to run or influence those spheres in their own countries to a greater or lesser degree; this has in the past often led to war, as in 1899 and 1914¹⁹, where private economic inter­ests are identified with those of the State. Equally, eco­nomic interests must not seek to control or influence the State or the political and legal life or the life of culture and the arts and sciences. Neither should the latter try to dictate to politics and the economy, as has happened in some religious communities and states. Each of the three spheres has its own being and life which needs to be respected.

Threefolding first emerged a century ago in Central Europe. It could not succeed then, as too many people across the political spectrum were prepared to allow the State to have its way in all three spheres, even in the cap­italist democracies. But a hundred years later, after much socio-economic pain and suffering, inefficiency and dis­aster, there is now widespread recognition, especially in the West, that some kind of fundamental change is required that goes beyond the egoism both of the indi­vidual and of the political or national group. Communist China has only been part of the capitalist world order for some 40 years, and the wealth it has generated through that participation has enabled both the alleviation of mass poverty and the wage slavery of modern Chinese industrial serfs on the assembly line. It has enabled the enthusiastic creation of many Chinese billionaires and also China’s totalitarian hi-tech surveillance system. China’s current system is a mixture of western capital­ism, western Marxism (with so-called “Chinese charac­teristics”) and traditional Chinese Neo-Confucianism and Legalism. Chinese nationalism and self-confidence is still strong, but the Chinese system is two thirds not their own, and the other third is not modern but ancient and has more in common with mediaeval Tibet or the Vatican than with modern times.

But if the West were to embrace Threefolding – if the State were to restrict itself to its own rightful sphere of law, rights, and defence; if local, regional, national and international economic associations were able to bring both ethics and rationality into the world of business instead of the reckless, inefficient, growth-obsessed, outdated and shark-like economic model we currently have; if the arts and sciences were free from interfer­ence from both the State and from business; if through threefolding, the West were to embrace a social and economic praxis that affirmed both the individual and the community – then millions in China would take no­tice and see that there was a modern alternative both to their own authoritarian mixture and to the old, often inhuman economic ruthlessness of the West. Based on a spiritual understanding of the human being far more radical than anything in Transhumanism, the emergent philosophy of the western elite, this modern alternative of Threefolding offers the way to avert a cataclysmic bi­nary conflict between China (with its allies Russia and Iran) and the USA and its client states in the Anglosphere and the EU. It may already be too late to bring this alter­native forward, but its seeds can at least be sown and its existence brought to the attention of millions, so that after Ahriman’s incarnation has ended, most likely by the mid-21st century, the alternative of Threefolding can be called upon to reshape society.

At this historic time, when Ahriman’s incarnation is about to become manifest, and when the current conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn ushers in a new, 200 year-long era in history²⁰, global elites working through the WEF and the WHO are trying to use false claims about climate change and COVID-19 to bring about a technology-driven, wartime emergency-style, State-led transformation of society that will have the surface ap­pearance of ‘greenness’ and ‘progressivism’ but it will not challenge fundamentals; the elitist 1% and their predatory behaviour will remain, just as they did after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s much-vaunted ‘New Deal’ in the 1930s. FDR in effect injected a dose of socialism in order to save the existing American capitalist sys­tem without fundamentally changing that system. The same is what is being proposed now in, for example, the post-COVID plans of the British government led by Bo­ris Johnson. The global elites’ goal with Agenda 2030 is to bring about a world order that will serve Ahriman’s interests in his incarnation. Those interests require not a threefold society in which the three spheres of culture, law and economy are autonomous but a form of ‘soft’ fascism or communism, a ‘onefold’ world order of ‘onefold’ societies controlled and directed in all three spheres by the State. In 1922 Rudolf Steiner said that he would reincarnate “in 80 years’ time and in America” – the land of Ahriman’s incarnation.²¹ The individuality that was Rudolf Steiner may not be associated with the Anthroposophical Society then but as a Christian esotericist, that individuality will surely somehow stand for Threefolding, for that means, in the modern age, to stand for the cosmic Trinity, and for the real nature of the human being and of human society.

Terry Boardman 2020

Notes

1 Lecture of 12.10.1923, in Collected Works GA 229.

2 Misunderstanding and disputes over the nature of the Trinity in the early Christian centuries had been a major reason for dissension within the Church. Steiner discusses the spiritual background to the debate over the Trinity in his lectures of 23,28,29,30 July 1922 in GA 214 and 16-17 March 1923, GA 222.

3 The Carolingian Empire (800-888) founded by Charlemagne, was divided into three parts between his grandsons in 843 (Treaty of Verdun). When Lothar II, the ruler of Lotharingia (or Middle Francia) , the Empire’s middle portion which ran from Holland in the north to Rome in the South, died in 869, his children were swiftly declared illegitimate, and his two Frankish uncles, Ludwig the German and Charles the Bald, invaded Lotharingia from East Francia and West Francia respectively and divided it between them in 870 by the Treaty of Mersen.

4 See Heinz Herbert Schöffler, Rudolf Steiner’s Millennium Prophecies (Henry Goulden Books, 1999) p. 36

5 See 2013 speech by Al Gore on Youtube in which he says that it was the war, not FDR’s New Deal, that ended the Depression in the USA, and calls for a wartime-style “national mobilisation” to defeat “climate change”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7dWG5ICxAA and also https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/

6 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/

7 E.g. re. COVID-19 – Prof. Bhakdi Sucharit (Ger.), Dr. Anders Tegnall (Swed.),

Prof. Knut Wittkowski (USA), Prof. John Ioannidis (USA), Prof. Sunetra

Gupta (UK), Dr Zach Bush (USA), Dr. Dan Erikson and Dr Artin Massihi

(USA); vaccines – Dr Andrew Wakefield (UK), Dr Judy Mikovits (USA); Dr. Rashid Buttar and Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (USA).

8 See: https://norberthaering.de/en/power-control/eurostar-known-traveller/

9 See: https://chinaresearchgroup.substack.com/p/quotes-from-welt-amsonntag-article    Original text (in German):

https://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/plus207687477/Mathias-Doepfner-Wir-muessen-uns-zwischen-Amerika-und-China-entscheiden.html

10 See n.7 above.

11 See John P. Cafferky, Lord Milner’s Second War (2013) and G.G. Preparata, Conjuring Hitler – How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (2005); G.Docherty and J.MacGregor, Hidden History (2013), K.M. Wilson, The Policy of the Entente (1985), E.E. McCullough, How the First World War Began (1999).

12 https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-09/us-gets-its-ass-handed-itworld-war-iii-simulation-rand

13 See R. Steiner, lectures 1-4 (4,9,10 and 11 Dec. 1916) in The Karma of Untruthfulness Vol. 1 and lect. 20 (15.1.1917), Vol. 2, Rudolf Steiner Press (2005).

14 See T. Boardman, ‘The Incarnation of Ahriman – When and Where?’ Parts 1 and 2 in TPA Vol. 5/Nos.7/8 Oct/Nov 2019 and Vol. 5/Nos.9/10 May/June 2020.

15 https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-research-towuhan/

The Institute opened China’s first Biosafety Level 4 research laboratory in 2015.

16 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

17 E.g. https://youtu.be/3Fic2dlKlhw

18 R. Steiner, The East in the Light of the West (G.P. Puttnam’s Sons, 1922) , p. xi.

19 1898 – the Spanish-American War, 1899 – the Boer War; 1914 – the Great War e.g. the Anglo-German arms race and the Berlin-Baghdad Railway: the struggle for the oil of the Middle East.

20 See T. Boardman, ‘…the diseases we suffer on earth are visitations from heaven’ in TPA, Vol. 5/ Nos. 9/10 May/June 2020, p. 11

21 See n. 4 above, p. 15. Also, C. Villeneuve ed., Rudolf Steiner in Britain – A Documentation of his Ten Visits Vol. II, 1922-1925 (Temple Lodge, 2004) p. 737.

To form any judgments about a phenomenon in contemporary events we can keep in mind three elements – the context of the event (awareness of how the event relates to the past), wakefulness (awareness of what’s going on now in relation to the event) and insight (understanding how the event relates to what seems to be approaching us from the future).

With these in mind, let us consider two recent contemporary events: NATO’s celebration of its 70th anniversary (3-4 December) and the UN COP 25 conference on climate change in Madrid, Spain (2 – 13 December). Both these two events began in the first week of Advent, a period which belongs to the darkest time of the year in the northern hemisphere – between Michaelmas and Christmas. It is at this time that the forces of opposition to human progress are at their most potent and an inner soul darkness can prevail that reflects the outer darkness in nature. Despite themselves, those forces of opposition actually serve that progress even while trying to obstruct it because it is in the resistance to, and the overcoming of, that obstruction (often called ‘evil’) that individuals and mankind in general actually make progress. We can see the outer darkness at this time of year reflected in society even in trivial ways such as the increasingly macabre quality of Halloween celebrations all around the world. Christmas of course is a celebration of peace yet in recent decades it has often been marred by appalling acts of violence in various countries.

The NATO conference in London at the beginning of December was a special summit arranged to celebrate the organisation’s 70th anniversary year since its founding on 4 April 1949. The first headquarters of NATO was in London and the first Secretary General, General Hastings Ismay,  was British. In May this year, when NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg visited the then British Prime Minister Theresa May in London, it was assumed that Britain would leave the EU on 31 October, so the anniversary summit was arranged for after October, in December, with the message that “Brexit will change the United Kingdom’s relationship to the European Union but it will not change the United Kingdom’s relationship to NATO,” as Stoltenberg had said in February¹. Indeed, the intention is that not only will Brexit not change the United Kingdom’s relationship to NATO, it will not change the ongoing unification of Britain’s military forces with those of EU countries. ‘EU Military unification’ involving Britain after Brexit has been a barely discussed issue in the Brexit debate but it is going on regardless and was merely hinted at in the vagueries of the Political Declaration document in the EU withdrawal deals agreed by both Prime Ministers Theresa May and her immediate successor Boris Johnson in 2018 and 2019 respectively.²

NATO – preserver of peace?

If you visit any official NATO website you will always be assured that the main purpose of NATO is to preserve or safeguard peace. Quite apart from the fact that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)] was involved in bombing operations in European countries, in the Balkans (Bosnia and Serbia) in the 1990s, which killed hundreds of civilians. Article 5 of NATO’s founding Treaty (1949), which stipulates that “an armed attack against one or more of [the Parties to the Treaty] shall be considered an attack against them all”, was invoked on 4 October 2001 following the events of 11 September in the USA to justify military operations against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Not only was this utterly absurd – even if Al Qaeda had been behind the events of 9/11, their enemy would have been solely the USA not countries such as Denmark, Belgium or Canada – it was an entirely bogus invocation of Article 5 by the then Secretary General, the Briton Lord Robertson, who from 1997 to 1999 had been Defence Minister in the socialist government of Tony Blair. On 2 October at a NATO General Assembly meeting in Brussels, Robertson read out a statement that purported to justify the invocation of Article 5, claiming that, in his words, “clear and compelling” evidence had been provided to NATO by a US envoy, the Dept. of State Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism, Frank Taylor. This was said to prove that the 9/11 attacks had been “directed from abroad”, namely Afghanistan. But this “clear and compelling” evidence was no such thing; Robertson was merely quoting from a “talking points paper”, a discussion paper that the US envoy Taylor had brought to Brussels. But Taylor’s briefing of NATO was classified and his briefing paper was not released to the public, who now only had Robertson’s word to go on, until 2008, by which time hundreds of thousands had been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, and billions of dollars spent. The declassification of the document made it obvious that the evidence in October 2001 used to justify NATO’s war on Afghanistan to the world had been very far from “clear and compelling”. It had amounted, in terms that would satisfy a court, to virtually zero.³ Some of the words that Robertson spoke in his fateful statement on 2 October 2001 had been taken verbatim from Taylor’s talking points briefing paper. On 7 October 2001, the US and the UK launched their first attacks on Afghanistan. 16 other NATO countries would soon join them and by mid-2003, 42 countries were involved in military operations in Afghanistan under NATO auspices. Today, 18 years after the beginning of the US/UK invasion of Afghanistan and after the outlay of almost $1 trillion for the war by the United States, the war still goes on and NATO is still involved, albeit at a much reduced level. So much for “preserving peace”.

But NATO was never about “preserving peace”. As its first Secretary General, Hastings Ismay (pic, right) famously said, its purpose was: “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” In other words, it was a war-fighting alliance, a system of control directed against Russia and Germany in the context of the global Cold War against the Soviet Union. From the perspective of the British governing elite, it was seen as vital that Britain and America remain firm allies that stood apart from, but were nevertheless in military, economic and political control of, the non-communist countries of Europe. The means to exercise that control were military (NATO) and political/economic (the EU project). Since a new Cold War against Russia was engineered in 2014 by the countries that lead NATO, one hundred years on from 1914, it has been argued by pro-NATO propagandists that we need NATO more than ever “because we live in an increasingly dangerous world”.

Such phrases have always been used to justify NATO’s existence. The main excuse has tended to be Russia’s seizure of Crimea, following the Ukraine crisis in the winter and spring of 2013-14. What is invariably overlooked here is the role of Arseniy Yatsenyuk (pic below), who became Prime Minister following the coup d’etat in Ukraine in February 2014 and remained so until July 2016. Yatsenyuk is the founder (in 2007) of the Open

Ukraine Foundation, which is directed by his wife. On its website, Open Ukraine lists its partners as the US State Department, NATO, the British foreign policy think-tank Chatham House, The German Marshall Fund (a leading transatlanticist German think-tank) and the American international lobby group, the National Endowment for Democracy. In 2008 Ukraine’s leaders — President Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Speaker of the Parliament, Arseniy Yatsenyuk — asked NATO to draw up an action plan for Ukraine to join NATO, but Russia forced Ukraine to back down by threatening to withdraw gas supplies; a new lease of the Sevastopol base to the Russians until 2042 was agreed between the two countries. (Sevastopol is the largest city in the Crimea Peninsula and a major Black Sea port and naval base). It was obvious from statements by US State Department officials Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt that were leaked during the Maidan coup of February 2014 that the US regarded Yatsenyuk – “Yats”, as the American officials called him – as ‘their man’. The Russians suspected that, as the new post-coup Prime Minister, Yatsenyuk would renege on the lease of Sevastopol and would instead lease the base to NATO. NATO encouraged these suspicions when in late February 2014 it declared that joining the organisation was still an option for Ukraine.

On 18 March 2014 President Putin made a speech in which he argued that Russia was forced to annex Crimea to prevent Ukraine joining NATO. He claimed that the West “had lied to us many times. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the East. … NATO remains a military alliance. I do not want to be welcomed in Sevastopol by NATO sailors.”⁴ It was NATO’s expanionist moves eastwards, following the fall of the USSR and culminating in the threatened loss of Russia’s naval base of Sevastopol to NATO, that prompted Putin’s move into the Crimea. The West seemed to ignore the burden of history; it ‘forgot’ what Sevastopol had meant to the Russians since the Crimean War (1853-1856) when the British and the French had besieged the city and eventually seized it, and since World War II when the Russians fought a terrible battle against the Germans for control of the city. It also seemed to forget that the former Soviet leader Khrushchev had simply transferred the Crimea – for reasons which remain unclear – from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954; the Crimea had never previously been part of “Ukraine”. For the Russians, the Crimea has long been a major economic (export/import) and military region and Sevastopol a major naval base. The West, however, insisted on the abstract principles of the UN Charter (which the US and UK had been instrumental in drawing up in 1945) that forbade the redrawing of borders by force; for the West, Sevastopol was part of Ukraine and was therefore Ukraine’s to do with as it wished. For Russia, the Crimea was and is vital to Russian interests and Ukraine cannot be permitted to allow NATO the use of Sevastopol.

In the Balkans, in Afghanistan and in relation to Crimea, NATO has been a source of tension, violence and warmongering rather than of peace. During the Cold War, it was the western equivalent of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-controlled military alliance, but when the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991, NATO did not also disband. On the contrary, over the next two decades, it expanded because the three reasons given for its existence by Gen. Hastings Ismay (see above) still apply in the minds of the members of the transatlanticist elite that controls NATO. Furthermore, a fourth reason has been added; in the 1990s China was emerging as a potential threat in the ever paranoid councils of NATO and the myriad western foreign policy think-tanks that service it.⁵ By the mid-2000s, such think-tanks were already speculating on how NATO would fight and win a war against China. Today, with Donald Trump regarded as the bull in the NATO china shop, stoking tensions in the organisation with his demands that NATO members pay their fair share financially, China is increasingly seen by western media and think-tanks as the factor that will make NATO hold together.⁶

Orwell’s 1984 and Goethe’s ‘mixed king’

Historians have long recognised that one of the major factors that pushed Europe into the Great War in 1914 was the deadly binary alliance system that had built up over the previous 20 years: the Triple Entente (France, Russia, Britain) vs the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy). Yet such has been the brilliance of the world’s statesmen and diplomats over the past 100 years that 2020 dawns on a very similar scenario; indeed, we have a scenario rather similar to that envisaged by George Orwell in his famous novel 1984, except that we have two great entities – as in 1914 – instead of the three in his book: where he had Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia in constant conflict over the remaining regions of the world, we today have the NATO Alliance (29 countries in 2019) vs the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)(8 members incl. Russia, China, India; 4 observers incl. Iran, Afghanistan and Mongolia) with the leading members of these two blocs struggling for access to the resources of the rest of the world e.g. lithium for the electric vehicle industry, uranium and thorium for the nuclear industry and various rare earth minerals. At December’s summit in London, NATO leaders for the first time discussed China as a “collective security challenge”.

The main reasons for this extremely dangerous situation are that in the East, we have three nuclear-armed superpowers, Russia, China and India plus one smaller power, Iran. In recalling Goethe’s Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795) one could well imagine that all of these four countries could be described as ‘mixed kings’, similar to the composite king in Goethe’s story who exists alongside the three gold, silver and brass kings. These countries are rather like ‘composite kings’ in that they seek to run modern, technological unitary states guided by decadent spiritual or political philosophies: Russian Orthodoxy, Confucianism plus Marxism, Hindu nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. When Goethe’s story reaches its culmination, the composite king, possessing no real integrity because he is not in tune with the needs of the times, collapses in a heap when he tries to stand up. It may seem at the moment as though Russia, China, India and Iran are functioning states but, in each case, the crunch is likely to come from within in terms of social pressures from citizens who are acting in accord – perhaps unconsciously – with the needs of the times e.g. the need for individual dignity and autonomy in the modern age, and when those pressures become intense enough, the ‘strong men’ at the top will be unable to cope: they and their ‘mixed king’ system will collapse. Meanwhile, in the West, we have modern, technological unitary states that are ruled not by strong men at the head of a political system but by invisible or at most semi-visible elites who act from the economic system and whose powerbases are diversified around the world, for example, in overseas tax havens. The West’s much vaunted democratic systems and political parties have become instruments of these elites, pantomimes controlled by vested interests and steered by the mass media. Many of the citizenry in the West participate in them cynically because there appears to be no alternative, although the dissatisfaction with the party political system is steadily growing.

In both East and West, unitary States prevail in which the three spheres of modern society (culture, politics, economics) interfere with one another or one dominates the others. Goethe’s Fairy Tale was already hinting, in an intuitive way, at a form of society advocated publicly by Rudolf Steiner in 1919 in which the three spheres would each be separate and autonomous but at the same time they would interrelate just as the three physiological spheres of the human body – the nerve sense system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic system – are separate, each with their own functions, but also interrelate. A hundred years ago, on 15 December 1919, Steiner said in a lecture attended by a group of English visitors that “if the Anglo-American economic life which is flowing out into world dominance does not take the trouble to become filled with an independent cultural life and an independent life of the rights and of the State, it will flow into a third abyss of human existence. The first abyss is that of falsehood….the second is the abyss of selfishness…And the third, in the physical realm, is sickness and death, and in the cultural realm the sickness and death of culture. The Anglo-American element may well achieve world dominion, but without the threefold ordering of society this dominion will flood the world with the death of culture and the sickness of culture.”

The first abyss he referred to has to do with untruths and falsehood in the realm of knowledge, of science and religion. Because falsehood predominates there in western societies, for example in the philosophies of materialism and atheism, it leads to the ‘second abyss’, selfishness in social and economic relations. The ultimate consequence of this is the ‘third abyss’, physical sickness, and death, even by suicide. A young person, for example, can become convinced, as is happening frequently nowadays with all the climate change paranoia, that the world is doomed and that his parents and teachers have all lied to him and failed him; he falls into despair and then, possibly into drugs as an escape from depression, and finally may even commit suicide. And the increase in suicides amongst young people in western culture is alarming. The falsehoods of much western materialist philosophy and religious rigidity have resulted in a western economic system that is based essentially on personal profit, greed, and self-interest, which are rationalised as ‘common sense’ and ‘natural human behaviour’ which ‘cannot be changed’ and ‘has always been like this’. On the basis of such thoughts rooted in falsehood and selfishness, western leaders attempt to deal with their counterparts in the East, while at the same time waving high the banners of abstract principles of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, or with talk of a UN or previously, a League of Nations, to “preserve peace” and “unite mankind”, as US President Woodrow Wilson did a hundred years ago in Paris. The Easterners, whilst suffering from their own falsehoods and  selfishness, invariably see right through such hypocrisy.

Unless  we can get beyond the unitary State and – in the West – the sham of political parties, and present to the East an alternative and ethical working model of society that does not require states to compete, as corporations currently do, for economic advantage, “Oceania” (USA/EU/NATO) seems fated to come to blows with “Eurasia”/”Eastasia” (SCO) in this century. The steady build-up of anti-Russian propaganda and increasingly, anti-Chinese propaganda in the West is as poisonous as was that of anti-German propaganda in the two decades before 1914. First, a poisonous atmosphere is prepared, and then, when people have got used to breathing that poisonous atmosphere, a pretext is created, a fuse lit and war begins. Week after month after year, we in the West have been conditioned to see Putin and Russia as a threat to Europe. People can use their own discrimination and ask why there are so many negative, anti-Russian stories in the media. Without being naïve, it begs the question as to where is the bridge building towards a whole nation of millions of Russian people?

Chinese and British ‘ethics’

This year, we have also seen a growing trend in anti-Chinese propaganda in the British media: increasing reports on the so-called ‘concentration camps’ for Uighur Muslims in the province of Xinjiang or on the sinister aspects of the Artificial Intelligence (AI)-facilitated Chinese social credit system of surveillance and control, or on the sale of human organs in China or the apparent readiness in China for scientists to conduct unethical genetic research. Certainly, these things are very disturbing, but they are all aspects of the falsehood, selfishness and sickness that result from the lack of a threefold society and, as such, are by no means negative phenomena that are restricted to China. In Britain, for example, the media have not, over the past 50 years, spent much time drawing attention to Britain’s expulsion of the Chagos Islanders from their Indian Ocean home so that the British State could turn the island of Diego Garcia over to the USA for its use as a military base (see pic below). “I cannot recall any other issue, at least in the 35 years that I was in the diplomatic service, which has so let down the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), undermined our ethical standards, been so carelessly and unsympathetically handled and caused so much unnecessary anguish than this one. I still feel ashamed at the way the FCO has treated and tricked a people whom we had a sacred duty to protect” – David Snoxell, deputy commissioner for British Indian Ocean Territory in the 1990s. Foreign Office minister Baroness Joyce Anelay said in 2016: “In an increasingly dangerous world [that phrase again! – TB], the defence facility is used by us and our allies to combat some of the most difficult problems of the 21st century including terrorism, international criminality, instability and piracy. I can today confirm that the UK continues to welcome the US presence, and that the agreements will continue as they stand until 30 December 2036.”⁷

As for a lack of ethics in medical procedures in China, since 1967 when the abortion law was repealed in the UK, 8.7 million abortions have been carried out in the UK. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party leader, to his credit, has always opposed the expulsion of the Chagossians and is presumably opposed to genocide of any sort, but the 2019 Labour Party manifesto provides for scrapping the current 24-week time limit on abortions and proposes to make abortion available on-demand, for any reason, up to birth. This would be the most extreme abortion law anywhere in the world, far more so than in the EU, where the most common upper limit is 12 weeks. Yet this Labour Party proposal has received relatively little attention in the media. Research into developing artificial wombs is also proceeding apace in various western countries.⁸ These will make natural birth – and therefore also women – unnecessary by the end of this century. It is claimed that artificial wombs are justified on the grounds of assisting premature babies and for enabling single men and homosexual couples to have children. As for China’s social credit surveillance system, not only have western tech firms been integrated for some time into China’s system⁹, such things are gradually creeping into the West¹⁰, albeit in a more disguised fashion, such as the ways in which Silicon Valley tech companies (e.g. Facebook, Google) spy on you online and manipulate your data, and how people with so-called undesirable political views (usually libertarian conservative or otherwise anti-Establishment) are increasingly seeing their websites and Youtube channels censored and then banned from the Web. Similar restrictions on free speech are spreading on university campuses throughout the English-speaking world.

One can see the way in which China is gradually being represented to westerners as an evil authoritarian State, rather as Germany was represented as an evil autocratic militarist State before 1914. The real problem, however, is in the nature of the State itself, in both East and West, and until the State is threefolded and its three spheres separated out and made autonomous so that the political State does not control the cultural or economic spheres and vice-versa, the worsening problems we are currently seeing in both East and West will prove unsolvable. Meanwhile, as in the decade before 1914, military ties between Britain and other European countries will continue to be fostered on an “informal” basis to the point where, as in August 1914, when the crunch comes, those ties will have become so tight that they are likely to draw all the countries involved into conflict with the designated enemy.

NATO and genocide

One final point about NATO: it contains three nuclear Powers: USA, Britain and France. Britain has four nuclear submarines, only two of which are constantly on duty, the other two are usually docked for repairs or supplies. If nuclear war were to occur and Russia were to wipe out the population of Britain in a first strike, which would presumably include the two submarines in dock, what would then be the point of the two British nuclear submarines at sea launching their own missiles? It would be nothing but a genocidal revenge attack against the Russians: they have wiped out almost all Britons; we shall therefore, along with our US allies (NATO Treaty Article 5) try and wipe out all the Russians. Is this eye-for-an-eye, genocide-for-a-genocide Old Testament “morality” where we have arrived at, after some 1500 years of Christianity in Britain? Such questions are rarely considered when it comes to politicians and voters debating defence spending. If the Russian government, as a result of some stupid decision it made, were actually to succeed in exterminating the population of Britain in a nuclear attack, would you, dear reader, want to get even from beyond the grave by exterminating all the people of Russia? When we ask such questions, we surely cannot but realise that NATO is an absurdity and a threat to world peace that should be dismantled as soon as possible before we repeat the catastrophic error of 1914, only this time, with nuclear weapons.

Steiner and the League of Nations

Fighting between the Allies and Germany ceased on 11 November 1918 but methods of war such as the British naval blockade against Germany continued until 28 June 1919, when the conflict between Germany and the Allies formally came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, five years to the day since the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Czech wife Sophie Chotek. Some 100,000 Germans died of starvation due to the blockade in 191911, but that fact is not widely known in Britain. 100 years ago this year, the war that had ruined European civilisation, more in its ethics and social values than in its buildings (the latter destruction would come in 1939-1945) formally came to an end. In place of the war, a structure of peace was supposed to be erected which would end wars for all time – the League of Nations, the cherished project of two men in particular: Lord Robert Cecil, third son of the late Lord Salisbury, and President Woodrow Wilson of the USA. What was Steiner’s view of the League of Nations? Here are three examples of his views of such supranational institutions:

“With the Wilsonian League of Nations, institutions are created which are bound to lead to mischief and constant suffering, when abstract human desires are imposed on facts; with regard to what touches the whole being of Central and Eastern European peoples, one does not create such institutions, but rather, when one releases something that is already free, it must lead to peaceful development; if it is unfree, it must lead to warlike conflicts. One cannot create the future condition of humanity through institutions, as Wilson and the Entente want to do [and as Jean Monnet also wanted to do - TB]; it will arise when one frees up the facts through which it can emerge.” (emphasis TB) (2nd Memorandum on Threefolding, 22.7.1919).

“The League of Nations is to become a unity of peoples who are closed off in themselves. The image of the Tower of Babel is one that would precisely oppose a [real] League of Nations in that the peoples have been separated off into their different cultures. And that [separation] is supposed to be the means to unite peoples [Steiner is being sarcastic here – TB]. The 14 Points, Woodrow Wilson’s Utopia, wants to accomplish the task through conserving what was indicated by the Tower of Babel, the unity of the peoples. It will only promote what drives peoples further apart. It will only make the confusion of the Tower of Babel even greater.  (lecture of 20.7.1919 GA 192)

“…founding “supra-states,” “supra-parliaments,” is really a sign that people do not want to slip out of the old nets of thinking, that they want to stay inside those old nets of thought. When what should be done is to separate the individual state into its three members [political/rights, economics and spiritual/cultural], people want to do the opposite. With the exception of those states that are now excluded [e.g. the USSR] they want to weld the whole earth into one big state. They want the opposite of what is rooted in the developmental forces of the time. Therefore, someone who stands within spiritual science should really have the insight to realise that it is necessary to mount a strong assault [Anstürmen] against what is still moving in the opposite direction today and he should translate that insight into action. This assault is necessary. One has to say this to oneself again and again. And since we have to get used to seeing right into things, it will be good to try quite often to experience the social element in one’s inner contemplation from this point of view… because that is what can fire our will.” (lecture of 22.3.1919)

The League of Nations was the first attempt by the Anglo-American elite to create a global organisation through which they could steer world events. It failed but in 1945 its successor, the UN, founded by much the same people, put down firmer roots because the USA was on board this time, and the UN was buttressed by a series of other global institutions created again by the same people, most of which institutions are still with us. NATO, founded in 1949, was one of these.

UN COP 25

The other event that took place in early December this year was the UN COP 25 Climate Change Conference in Madrid which was attended by, amongst many others, the Swedish teenage Climate Change campaigner Greta Thunberg (pics, above), who had sailed to Portugal from the USA on board a wealthy Australian couple’s catamaran in order to reduce her ‘carbon footprint’. Thunberg has travelled by sea across the Atlantic twice this year to attend UN conferences and proclaim her messages of “climate emergency” and “unite behind the science”. She is regarded by millions as a heroine and saviour. So was US President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) who also crossed the Atlantic by sea, twice, 100 years earlier in 1919, to attend the Paris “Peace Conference”. As Thunberg has been, arguably, ‘the face of 2019’, Wilson was the face of 1919. He too was hailed as a saviour in Europe, bringing his 14 Points Programme, with its dogma of national self-determination which he was determined Europe and the Conference should accept, and bringing too his fervour for the idea of the League of Nations. As the League of Nations was at the centre of Wilson’s hopes for the world, the UN is at the centre of Thunberg’s message in that it is the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which, since its founding in 1988, has been, in effect, coordinating the global climate change movement. The UN’s IPCC, which is actually a political rather than a scientific research body,  is the focus of her message to “unite behind the science” on climate change. The UN Secretary General António Guterres, a former Portuguese socialist politician, opened the COP¹²25 Summit in Madrid by giving the usual apocalyptic speech on the subject of climate change that climate alarmists  – global coolers as well as global warmers – have been giving since the 1970s. He said that by the end of the 2020s the world will be at the crossroads, either on the way to catastrophe or recovery, and he lauded the youthful climate activists who are demanding drastic action now. Guterres’ speech was picked up and given maximum attention by the mainstream media, during two weeks of protest actions by the climate change group Extinction Rebellion. What was not so highlighted by the media was Guterres’ announcement ahead of the conference, on 1 December, that Canadian Mark Carney, who will step down as Governor of the Bank of England in January 2020, will become the United Nations’ special envoy on climate action and climate finance. Guterres described Carney as “a remarkable pioneer in pushing the financial sector to work on climate”. This, of course, is the same Mark Carney who on 23 August this year presented a radical proposal for a new global financial system that would eventually replace the dollar as a reserve currency with a virtual currency similar to Libra, the crypto-currency to be launched by Facebook next year. It was soon revealed that Carney had recently flown to the USA for a secret meeting with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.¹³ Libra will be a digital currency with which customers can pay for goods, send money to friends without using banks, and buy virtual coins, all via Facebook-owned websites (e.g. Instagram, Whatsapp), as well as other sites. Traditional bankers are exercised by this development, to say the least. This new global currency, prophesied by the influential British weekly magazine  The Economist back in 1988 (“Get Ready For A World Currency By 2018”)¹⁴ (see pic below), is all part of the massive restructuring of the capitalist economy which is about to take place and which involves the so-called ‘Green New Deal’, “sustainable technologies” that will soak up trillions of dollars in investment from governments and pension funds and the new financial instruments that will be – are being  – created to fund all of this without, however, any real change in the fundamentals of the capitalist economy.¹⁵

So what is the connection between the NATO summit in London and COP 25 in Madrid? As two more anti-Russian stories surfaced in the British media in the first two weeks of December, the latest instalments in the ongoing western propaganda war against Russia¹⁶, in the same period the massive Russia-China ‘Power of Siberia’ natural gas pipeline finally went on stream – a $400 billion, 30-year deal signed by the two countries in 2014. The transformation of the West’s capitalist economy via the Green New Deal based on the bogus “science” of global warming¹⁷, and ‘fronted’ in the public consciousness by Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, is intended not least to undermine the economies of Russia and China, which are dependent to such a large part on so-called ‘fossil fuels’. In this 21st century we are witnessing a gigantic struggle between the elites of the East and the West for geopolitical status. In the East we have decadent politics and a lack of social imagination at the upper levels of society, a dependence on the gifts of nature and the heritage of tradition; in the West we have current events (e.g. 9/11),‘science’, ‘philosophy’, and ‘history’ (e.g. 1914, 1939, 1941, Vietnam, Gulf Wars to name but a few) that are often based on falsehoods, lies and deception and an economic life based on the same and on a consequent immoral ethics.

The way through this Scylla and Charybdis situation is, as Steiner argued a hundred years ago, to get into as many minds as possible the real alternative that lies in front of us: the ideas of social threefolding¹⁸, which can cut the connection between the State and the spheres of culture and economics. When politics and the law are freed from the influence of an egoistical business life and when cultural life and education are freed from State control, they can inform our economic life with a new ethics and sense of responsibility towards consumers, workers and the natural environment. If this does not happen, then the unitary States in East and West, in which the three spheres are all in confusion, will inevitably come into conflict.

Notes

1 https://www.euractiv.com/section/defence-and-security/news/london-to-host-70th-anniversary-nato-summit/
2 See sections 90-107 of the Political Declaration 2019
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/revised_political_declaration.pdf
See also: https://www.ukcolumn.org/series/eu-military-unification
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irT8FKclUoc
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/05/europe-is-ready-for-its-own-army/
3 See The Corbett Report Episode 345 – The Secret Lie That Started the Afghan War https://www.corbettreport.com/afghanwar/
4 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-nato-commentary-idUSKCN0XW0V3
5 e.g. Chatham House (UK), The Council On Foreign Relations (USA), Die Atlantik Brücke (Ger.) et al.
6 “A challenge from China could be just the thing to pull NATO together” – https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/03/asia/nato-china-russia-intl-hnk/index.html
7 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/16/chagos-islanders-cannot-return-home-uk-foreign-office-confirms
8 https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2019/11/26/why-growing-babies-outside-the-womb-raises-ethical-concerns/
9 https://www.technocracy.news/western-tech-giants-propping-up-chinas-surveillance-state/
10 https://www.fastcompany.com/90394048/uh-oh-silicon-valley-is-building-a-chinese-style-social-credit-system
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7396975/Is-social-credit-coming-Report-claims-systems-like-Chinas-used-Silicon-Valley.html
11 S.L. Bane, The Blockade of Germany after the Armistice 1918–1919, Stanford University Press 1942, p. 791
12 COP = Conference of the Parties; the COP 1 conference was in Berlin in 1995. COP 3 was in Kyoto, Japan in 1997.
13 https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-7396207/Bank-England-finally-admits-Carney-held-talks-Zuckerberg-row-rages-new-currency.html
14 https://www.goldbroker.com/news/the-economist-get-ready-for-a-world-currency-by-2018-1179
15 See my article “’Unite Behind the Science’? Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and Technocracy” in New View Issue 93, Oct–Dec 2019 http://threeman.org/?p=2846.  See also: Cory Morningstar: http://www.theartofannihilation.com/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-a-design-to-win-a-multi-billion-dollar-investment-volume-ii-act-i/
16 The first related to relating to an revelation by the Internet discussion site Reddit that documents presented by Jeremy Corbyn (only a week before the UK general election), which he claimed were about US and UK government talks on the UK National Health Service, had in fact been leaked by Russian sources allegedly seeking to “manipulate the election” and “cause mischief”; the second was news that Russia had been banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) from all major international sports competitions (including the Olympics) for four years following accusations of the manipulation of laboratory data.
17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2ldNuKZgoA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvHMhZ1T964
18 R. Steiner, Towards Social Renewal (Collected Works GA 23) Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999. For more books on threefolding, see also Rudolf Steiner Press https://www.rudolfsteinerpress.com/   Temple Lodge Publishing https://www.templelodge.com/ and Steinerbooks https://steinerbooks.org/

Chester, a city in the northwest of England on the border with Wales and some 17 miles from Liverpool, was the largest base of the Roman army in Britannia during the Roman occupation. The name Chester comes from the Latin castrum, which means fortified military base, camp or fortress. The city, which the Romans called Deva Victrix, was founded by the Roman Army in 79 AD, 46 years after the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. That was also the year of the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed the city of Pompeii.

                                         Roman Chester (Deva Victrix)

From 1905 until 1972 Chester was the base of Western Command, the regional headquarters of the British Army responsible for Wales and the Northwest of England. My grandfather, who had married one of Britain’s first women soldiers (the Woman’s Army Auxiliary Corps, 1917), was a civilian manager at Western Command. From 1938 to 1972 the large site of Western Command was located above the River Dee, in front of the secondary school I attended – Chester City Grammar School. It was not a boarding school, nor was it a private school, but the headmaster had a classical and military background and wanted the school to be a worthy rival for the private schools in the local area. The school had all the characteristics of private all-boys’ schools in those days – uniforms for the boys, gowns for the ‘masters’, houses, prefects (elder boys chosen to act as the ‘police force’), Latin and Greek lessons, a rowing club, an Army Cadet Force and ferocious discipline maintained through frequent corporal punishment. We boys regarded the school as something of a concentration camp, an obstacle course through which for at least four years we had to negotiate fights with bullies and thrashings by prefects and masters. Only in the last two years of our time there, from the age of 16, were we suddenly treated by the school system like human beings with views of our own.

However, there were some very memorable ‘masters’, many of them real eccentrics. Some were wounded individuals, with problems left over from their service in the world wars, and some were near sadists, but others were excellent teachers who really taught us to think and express ourselves in debate and writing. Through my interest in history, I had already become fascinated by foreign affairs before I started at the school in the autumn of 1963 and my fascination was only spurred on by school trips to Austria and France. Some three years later, with three classmates, I started a political party. It was a school affair and came out of our debating society experience. We called it the European Nationalist Party, not because we were right-wing nationalists, but because we wanted Europe to become one nation, a United States of Europe, on the American federal model, because that was the only model we could envisage for such an entity at that time. We were naive and idealistic – and ignorant. We didn’t know much about the workings or the origins and intentions of the European Economic Community (EEC), which General Charles De Gaulle, the French President, had recently barred Britain from joining, and which the leader of the Conservative Party, Edward Heath, was keen that Britain should nevertheless still seek to join. Above all, we wanted the USA and the USSR to withdraw their troops from Europe, and to stop interfering in Europe, so that the peoples of Europe could be themselves and find their own way forward, independent of the Great Powers of East and West. Ironically, we felt that way forward should be through imitating the US model.

Britain and the EEC

American models in all things had, after all, been prominent in British life since the war years and were increasingly so. We knew nothing of Rudolf Steiner or of social threefolding, his vision, developed in the last years of the First World War, of a society organised in accordance with its three constituent parts – cultural life, legal/political life and economic life – so that they would be autonomous and not interfered with or dominated by each other, as had been the case for over a hundred years already, with the political State seeking to direct cultural and economic life in both communist and capitalist countries, in different ways. I would know nothing of Rudolf Steiner and threefolding until I was 29. What I did know by the time I left the ‘concentration camp’ in 1970 and went to university in Manchester was that I had a strong animus against any imposed uniformity and authoritarianism, the assumed right of ‘those on high’ to determine the lives of those ‘below’ them.

At university until the end of 1973, I became active in student politics in the Arts Faculty (I was studying history). While I was at university, Edward Heath, who was now the Prime Minster of a Conservative government, renegotiated Britain’s membership of the EEC, and on 1 January 1973, Britain formally joined. I didn’t take much interest in that whole process because besides history, and indeed, almost replacing it, was my new found love of music, for which Manchester in those days was a magnet, and my interest in politics at the local level of our own department. My pro-EEC sentiments had remained from my schooldays, however, and my hitch-hiking trips in western Europe only boosted my youthful fascination for the continent. Europe ¬ at least as far as the ‘Iron Curtain’ ¬ felt like my oyster, and I wanted, with all the self-centred egoism of the 21 year old, to explore and enjoy it – for myself.

At the same time, I had been greatly disappointed by the victory of Heath’s Conservative Party in 1970. It seemed that after the radicalism of the 1960s, the country had opted to return to familiar conservative habits. Britain, despite the much-vaunted youth culture of the 1960s, the hippies (of whom there were really only a few in Britain) and the over-hyped culture of sex-drugs-rock’n’roll, seemed to me like a fossilised place in danger of becoming stuck in the past. Only music seemed to point a way forward for me. Entry into the EEC, in spite of its bureaucrats and legions of men in suits, was welcome, I felt, but it was not a great draw for young people in those days. It was mostly a project for middle-aged men. I remained unaware of the deceptions that had been practised by Heath’s government and by the Civil Service to get the country into the EEC club. Indeed, I would remain unaware of these for many years.

Japan, Britain and Europe

After university I went to Japan, where I worked as an English teacher. There I was so taken up with getting to grips with my job, with the culture and the language of Japan, that I had little time or inclination to give to the question of Britain in the EEC. I was hardly aware of the 1975 referendum in which the British people – finally given a chance to express a view on the issue of membership of the EEC two years after Heath had taken them into it – decided by a substantial majority that they wanted to stay in. As in the 2016 referendum, the financial and media lobby resources of the ‘Remain’ (in the EEC) lobby, far outstripped those of the ‘Leave’ (the EEC) campaign. In other words, in both referenda the British elites were very much in favour of Britain remaining in the EEC/EU. Later, I would discover why.

After being in Japan for about four years, I slowly began to look back towards Britain again. A summer trip there in 1979, in which my Japanese girlfriend and I hitch-hiked the length of the country up to the Isle of Lewis and back down to Cornwall, was a turning point in which I resolved to return. I could see that after the industrial turmoil of the 1970s, the upsurge of feminism, the extreme right-wing National Front, the explosion of punk rock, the country was much angrier, and Margaret Thatcher was now Prime Minister, a much more strident figure than I remembered her from Edward Heath’s government. From that 1979 trip I recall a punk band playing a live set in a pub in London: the lyrics of one of their ‘songs’ seemed to consist of nothing but the refrain: “We hate! We hate!” Hatred was not something that suddenly emerged in British society c.2016.

Nevertheless, despite the ugly aspects of a Britain in seeming decay in 1979, for the first time, I felt I was able to see ‘my country’ objectively – its positive sides as well as the negative, the gentle, beautiful and caring as well as the crass, aggressive and selfish. The years in Japan had separated me inwardly from Britain; something had been severed, and this, I would later realise, was the instinctive connection to the folk soul. When we grow up in a culture and live most of our lives within it and within its language, we are like fish in water. Living abroad for a period of time, certainly more than two years, as opposed to just holidaying abroad, enables us to come out of our own cultural water as we encounter the folk being of the other culture. After a couple of years living in Japan (it may be earlier for others, depending on the person) it seemed to me that I had crossed a certain threshold in my relationship with the country and the various earthly manifestations of its culture, its ways, habits, and characteristics. At this point, the initial openness,  fascination and sympathy many feel on arriving in a new country can give way to antipathy, an awareness of the shadow side of the culture and judgmentalism. The newcomer may integrate this shadow side into his experience and understanding of the culture and choose to remain in the country or he will fail to do so and if he remains, he may become embittered and antipathetic; alternatively, incapable of dealing with it, he will reject that culture and will leave. I thought I had crossed that threshold after my first two years in Japan, but whereas my time there had somehow cut my inner connection to Britain, the trip home in 1979 reopened my eyes to the country, especially to the beauty of its nature and its historical heritage, but now from the outside, as it were. I now felt able to relate to Britain no longer as my country but as another country, albeit as one with which I was familiar. Two years later, then, my Japanese girlfriend and I relocated to Britain and got married in my hometown of Chester. Almost immediately, we encountered Anthroposophy and Eurythmy.

The 1980s

In the 1980s the government of Margaret Thatcher began to pull in two contrary directions with regard to the EEC: on the one hand the British made a signal contribution to the development of the Single Market through the work of Lord Arthur Cockfield, who Thatcher appointed to join the European Commission, but on the other hand, Thatcher felt Britain was contributing too much money to the European Community and gradually shifted during her three periods in office (1979-1990) from her pro-EEC stance of the early 1970s to a stubborn resistance against any further supranational moves towards unification and federalism. In the second half of the 1980s I became interested both in the story of the mysterious foundling Kaspar Hauser (1812-1833), who was dubbed the ‘Child of Europe’, as the newspapers interested all of Europe in his fate, and also in the role played in his destiny by the British aristocratic secret agent, Lord Stanhope. At this time I also developed an interest in Steiner’s ideas about social threefolding. It was through a short-lived British anthroposophical current affairs magazine Shoreline (1988-92) – produced and edited by Charles Lawrie – that I began to inform myself about the European unification project, having already studied Rudolf Steiner’s detailed exposition on the background to the First World War, a series of 25 lectures later published in English as the Karma of Untruthfulness, Vols. 1 & 2.¹ Steiner’s lectures had alerted me to a very different understanding of the history of the 20th century from the conventional one, the one I had become familiar with through my academic studies and the media. I gradually began to realise around the time of the Maastricht Treaty (1991) how the European Union project fitted into long-range and long-held plans for world domination by western elites, plans which went back to the late 19th century. In the early 1990s I wrote several articles about this, which became the basis of my first book, Mapping the Millennium, published in 1998.

From Cold War 1 to Cold War 2

During the 1990s it became clear that, despite the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, America and its allies had no intention of disbanding NATO, which from the first Gulf War (1991) now became the military arm of the American “unipolar world order”. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia (1991-1999) showed all too clearly the connection between the EU and NATO. Then with the rise to power of Vladimir Putin in Russia in 1999, 9/11 and the consequent wars it led to in Afghanistan and Iraq, China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2002, and the emergence of a new non-western economic bloc  – the BRIC² countries – ,  a new bipolar world order, a new East vs West rivalry gradually emerged. In this situation, western Establishment media began to regard Russia and China first as “rivals” then, more recently, as “threats” and to insist on “the solidarity of the West” in the face of these supposed “threats”. This foreign policy stance has not essentially altered with the change from Obama to Trump. Geopolitical commentators have seen similarities in the US-China relationship and the relationship between the British and German empires in the two decades before 1914 – a declining Power (Britain then, the USA now) felt challenged and “threatened” by a rising Power (Germany then, China now) – a very dangerous situation, because the declining Power feels tempted to use political and military means to try and reduce or quash the economic and cultural challenge. These same western commentators emphasised the need for EU countries, almost all of which had by 2014 been drawn into NATO, to remain closely bound to the USA. As the pro-western website Politico recently indicated in an article titled “Europe’s Dependence on the U.S. Was All Part of the Plan” :  the USA has relied upon the EU and the European unification project, which the USA itself stimulated and promoted³, as the political and economic arm of its permanent military presence in Europe.⁴

The western Establishment media would have us believe that “fake news” and “post-truth” began c. 2016 with Donald Trump and Brexit, whereas in fact, while they have existed since the time when mass newspapers first appeared in the late 19th century, they were given a tremendous boost at the time of 9/11 and in the years that followed.

With the end of the (first) Cold War in the 1990s, I realised that what has to be avoided at all costs in the 21st century is another East vs West binary world order such as existed between the eastern communist (extreme collectivist) and western capitalist (extreme individualist) societies from 1917 to 1991. There has to be a middle region between the poles of East and West, and the danger is that Europe, which historically has contained these two individualist and collective poles itself within its own western and eastern regions respectively and is therefore well-suited to play the role of intermediary on the global scale, cannot do so because it has been ‘captured’ by one of the two poles. It is the EU and NATO which have effected this capture and which sustain it.

The USA requires a European Union under its wing, rather like Batman requires his junior assistant, Robin. Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz, one of Rudolf Steiner’s closest pupils and a man with a deep understanding of geopolitics and world events from a spiritual perspective, wrote in 1928: “The Middle of Europe is a Mystery space. It requires of people that they conduct themselves accordingly with regard to it. The path of the cultural epoch in which we live leads from the West to the East through this space [of Middle Europe]. […] All old forces lose themselves on this path to the East, they cannot pass further through this space without renewing themselves out of the spirit. If they seek to do so, they become forces of destruction and give rise to catastrophes. It is in this space which, from human knowledge, human love and human courage, that must come about which may then proceed in a healing way towards the East.” ⁵

Western parliamentarianism and other political movements, such as fascism⁶ and communism – all have become perverted or have lost themselves en route in the East because they have not renewed themselves out of the spirit, and they have become forces of destruction in either central or eastern Europe over the past 100 years. The same has been happening with the impulse of the Catholic Church since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s to penetrate the Orthodox regions of eastern Europe, notably Ukraine, and also with the western, American-inspired impulses of the European Union and NATO. The former President of the EU Commission, the Portuguese José Manuel Barroso, said in 2007: “Sometimes I like to compare the European Union, as a creation, to the organisation of empires, the empires, and because we [the EU] have the dimension of the empires. But there is a great difference. The empires were usually made through force, with a centre that was imposing a diktat, a will, on the others, and now we have what some authors call ‘the first non-imperial empire’. We have, by dimension, 27 countries that freely decided to work together to pool their sovereignties…and work together to add value. I believe it’s a great construction and we should be proud of it. At least, we in the Commission are proud of it.” At this point his fellow Commissioner, the Swede Margot Wallstrom, Commissioner for Communications, interjected: “I think, wasn’t it [Jacques] Delors who said, jokingly, that you have to be either a genius or French to understand the construction of it. But I propose something much more useful to citizens [i.e. to help them understand the EU], and that is ‘Solutions United’  – like a football team.”⁷  Wallstrom, a non-academic Scandinavian, may have felt uncomfortable here with the academic Barroso’s reference to the EU as an ‘empire’ and, as more of a professional politician than Barroso, she sought to explain the EU through a more ‘folksy’, media-savvy slogan that she evidently felt was ‘closer to the people’. But her football team analogy not only masks the reality of the EU, it serves to lead attention away from the ‘imperial cat’ that Barroso, perhaps inadvertently, let out of the bag.

The Four Kings, the Palladium and Parsifal

What then must proceed in a healing way towards the East, from Europe as far as China and Japan to build a human bridge between these communities? The insight that, as Steiner put it in what he called ‘the Motto of the Social Ethic’: “The healing social life is found when in the mirror of the human soul the whole community finds its reflection and when in the community the strength of each one is living.” This implies a society in which individuals constantly seek to be aware of and responsive to what is going on in their society and one in which the community values and upholds the qualities of each individual member of the community. This unites the individual and communitarian impulses of west and east, respectively.

Based on this ethical insight is what Steiner called the Fundamental Social Law: “The well-being of a community of cooperatively working human beings is the greater the less individuals demand the proceeds of their work for themselves or, in other words, the more they make over these proceeds to their co-workers and the more their needs are met not by their own work but from that of others.” This calls for insight on the part of individuals, especially those in the West, into how much they depend on each other for their needs to be satisfied. If, given today’s world economy, we really thought of how much we depend, for example, on the work of millions of workers in China to sustain our lifestyle, how could we possibly regard the Chinese as enemies? But China’s authoritarian regime is sustained by a bizarre mix of western Marxism-Leninism, Confucianism and western capitalism, a mixture the Chinese Communist Party likes to call “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Drawing from Goethe’s Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795) China’s system today, we can say, is neither a golden king, a silver king, nor a bronze king; it is the fourth king in the story – the king who is a mix of the three elements. Steiner described how the three kings are symbols of wisdom (gold/thinking), beauty (silver/feeling), and strength (bronze/willing). Goethe was not thinking of China when he wrote his story in 1795, but we can say that in the case of modern China, the thinking of its rulers is based on Marxist-Leninist thought; its will, the basis of its physical economy, is capitalist, while its social and ethical feeling is still informed by ancient Chinese sentiments, a further mix of Confucianism and Legalism, despite 70 years of Communism. The current Chinese system is a 70 year-old mixed king.

In Goethe’s story, at one point the mixed king cries out with a broken voice: “Who will govern the world?” and the Old Man replies: “He who stands upon his feet”. “I am he”, says the mixed King. “We shall see”, replies the Old Man, “for the time is at hand.”⁸ When Goethe’s story reaches its denouement, and the hidden temple, its dome lit by the sun, has risen from the depths of the river, the three kings stand up one by one but the mixed king collapses into a misshapen lump when the will-o’-the-wisps have licked the gold veins from out of him. The mixed king can also be said to refer not only to the Chinese regime but also to all the unitary nation states of today -  including the nascent super-state that is the EU – where the government seeks to combine and control all three spheres of social life: the cultural, the political and the economic i.e. the spheres of thought, of feeling and of will. Steiner insisted that in the modern world the three spheres must not be controlled by one power, the political government, but must be autonomous, with their own forms of administration. Only in this way can individuals be free in the cultural sphere (the gold king) – through teaching, research and jurisprudence – to contribute to the efficacy of the other two spheres, the political and the economic. The unitary nation state, in which the State functions rather like the board of a corporation, managing and taking responsibility for almost everything, is a hangover from the 18th and 19th centuries, a pre-democratic age when most individual citizens were not trusted by their self-appointed social ‘superiors’ with any or much responsibility. In those centuries and also in the 20th century, the State arrogated to itself ever greater powers, especially in times of war, in order to mobilise and control the population for the war effort. The unitary nation state is a State organised for war, and competitive economic life in the West since the 18th century is predicated on conflict and strife between individuals, companies and nations – in direct contradiction to the real bases of economic life, which are cooperation and service, without which no economic life can take place.

Goethe wrote his Fairy Tale in response to the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man written by his good friend, the poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). The subject of the Letters was the triad of necessity, reason and freedom. “Schiller saw that a harmonious social life could only be founded on the basis of free human personalities” and that “there was an ‘ideal human being’ within everyone. […] the challenge was to bring the outer life experiences into harmony with this ‘ideal’. Then the human being would lead a truly worthy existence.” The French “revolution was driven by a desire for outer social changes to enable human personalities to become free. But both Schiller and Goethe recognised that freedom cannot be ‘imposed’ from the outside but must arise from within each person.”⁹

The EU cannot bring ‘freedom, peace and prosperity’ to Europeans from outside; only they themselves, through their own experience and efforts,  can produce those qualities from within themselves and between each other – if they recognise how those three elements (the three kings) live within themselves as individuals in Europe and between each other. The three mixed kings of the EU, of the PRC and of the USA are bound to fall, most likely in this century, and most likely in that order. Along with them will likely also fall the United Kingdom, the artificial construct that was created only in 1801 during the war against Napoleon’s France and which since the late 20th century has often been dubbed “UK plc” – the nation regarded as an economic corporate entity, engaged in constant economic conflict with other national plcs.

This model of national economic competition and conflict arising from it is what the West has ‘bestowed’ upon China since the time of the Opium Wars (1839-1860). Bestowed with the aid of missionary ‘Christianity’, it has little to do with anything Christian. By contrast, Steiner pointed in 1921, at the time of the Washington Conference between Britain, the USA and Japan, to the story of the Palladium¹⁰, a symbol (actually a wooden statue) of the Goddess Pallas Athena, who was one of the forms in which the ancients understood the Being of the Sun, the Being who had not yet incarnated on the physical plane. With the Palladium, which the Trojans held to be a symbol of divine protection of their city, the priests of Troy taught the people through their rituals about the threefold nature of the cosmic Sun Being  – Light, Life and above all, Love.

The Palladium was later taken to Rome, where it was safeguarded in the temple of Vesta, and its existence was known only to initiate priests and emperors. But its connection with the knowledge of the Cosmic Sun Being was, according to Steiner, what drew early Christians to Rome. Later, the Emperor Constantine removed it to Constantinople, and hid it under the great porphyry Column of Constantine, which was topped by an image of himself in the figure of Apollo. In thus removing from Rome the protective power of the Palladium, goes the legend, Constantine doomed the old city of Rome and also removed from Roman Christianity the last vestiges of an understanding of the cosmic Sun Being, the cosmic understanding of the Christ Logos, the relation between Christ and the Sun, the Logos being the source of Light, Life and Love and indeed of the created world, as the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John makes clear. Christ was and is thus far more than a Messiah, an earthly political ruler for a particular people.

Following Constantine’s removal of the Palladium, however, over the next 1200 years, from Constantine to Henry VIII of England (1509-1547), spiritual and temporal rulership in Europe – the spiritual and the political -  increasingly tended to merge.

Legends tell of a future removal of the Palladium to the Slavic northeast when the East, devoid of its ancient wisdom, will have become utterly decadent. Then it will be the time for the Palladium to receive illumination from the West. The East, its ancient spirituality still alive but decadent, waits for a new light of spiritual illumination and inspiration from the West, but the West is mainly interested, Steiner claimed in 1921, only in economic benefits from the East. If Asia finds in what the West brings to it only bullying, arrogance, and greed, it will increasingly meet the West with antipathy and eventually violence, as happened with Japan in 1941. In terms of the Grail story, however, the Asian Fierifis needs what the western Parsifal has to offer – individual conscience and freedom, the resurrected Sun force within the human individual that brings light and warmth to others – and Asia will recognise these out of the forces of its own declining spirituality, just as Fierifis recognised the quality of Parsifal. Then the ‘Palladium’ in the East, which is currently still in darkness, as we see today in the collectivist forms of Chinese Communism and Indian nationalism, will be able to light up again and be re-enlivened by the Parsifal spirit of the West, which is actually the spirit of Christian conscience and Christ consciousness.

By the time I wrote my first book in 1998, I had realised, as I have argued in these three New View articles on the subject of Brexit, that the EU is a regressive step not only for Britain but for Europe as a whole; it manifests the spectre of ancient Rome in modern times, the gradual emergence of an all-imposing totalitarian spirit via the method of boiling frogs: placing frogs in cool water and gradually turning up the temperature so that not realising what’s happening, the frogs remain in the water until they are boiled alive. The EU, in its relationship with the USA, reduces the global triad of East, Middle and West to a binary: the West (America and Europe) against the East (Russia, Iran, China). Europe is unable to fulfil its proper global intermediary function between East and West because it is bound to America.

The unitary super-nation state that the EU is seeking to become, step by inexorable step, will restrict the free spiritual and cultural life of the individual and make it subject to the dictates of economics and politics. For these reasons, and because I now knew about the extent of the deception and lies that many British politicians of all parties and the media had been telling the British people for 50 years about the EU project and Britain’s entry into it, I now knew that I would have to support exit from the EU in the referendum that was held on 23 June 2016, despite the very dubious nature of the campaign on both sides in the run-up to the event, and the tactical untruths told by both sides in the referendum campaign.

If the British people, against the odds, succeed in leaving the EU and then succumb to the siren song of those Anglo-chauvinists who wish to continue – albeit in a different form  – dreaming the imperial dreams of Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner by further consolidating the relations of the “Five Eyes” countries¹¹ (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) to maintain the financial and military domination of those English-speaking countries in world affairs, then the British people would only be taking a different path backwards towards the spectre of Rome. If, however, they can resist those siren voices, then perhaps they can be an inspiration to the other peoples of Europe to withdraw also from the delusional EU neo-Roman ‘empire’ construct of Monnet and Barroso, Macron and Merkel, so that the peoples of Europe can eventually set about creating a truly threefold European associative community that is appropriate for this modern epoch.

This European associative community, open to the world for research and economic relations, though not to free mass movement of economic migrants, would thereby maintain a real ‘diversity’ of European cultures, rather than become a single conformist unitary state in which the cultural, political and economic spheres are increasingly uniform. It would be based on something like Steiner’s Motto of the Social Ethic and the Fundamental Social Law – a threefold European community that can indeed function as a healing, helpful intermediary between East and West.

Terry Boardman

Endnotes

1 Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2005.

2 Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.

3 See my first article in this three-part series in New View Issue #90, Jan.-Mar. 2019.

4 https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-dependence-on-the-us-was-all-part-of-the-plan-donald-trump-nato/

5 T.H. Meyer, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz – A European (Temple Lodge, 2014) p. 249.

6 The word fascism comes from the bundles of rods (fasces) containing an axe held by the lictors, the official bodyguards who protected Roman magistrates wherever they went. The axes symbolised the power of capital punishment. Fasces can be seen flanking the Speaker’s chair in the US House of Representatives.

7 Youtube: Euractiv TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Ralocq9uE

8 Interestingly, the words “Stand up!” feature strongly in “The March of the Volunteers” – the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China.

9 See Tom Raines, New View summer 2003, https://web.archive.org/web/20070929202046/http://www.newview.org.uk/green_snake.htm

10 Rudolf Steiner, The Sun-Mystery in the Course of Human History  – The Palladium, Dornach, 6.11.1921, Collected Works GA 208.

11 So called because they only share certain highly classified intelligence data amongst themselves and not even with their NATO allies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

This article was first published in New View magazine (Issue 90, Jan-Mar 2019)

Brexit is not only an economic and political issue; it is also a spiritual issue, a cultural issue of our time, because the EU is a construct that contradicts the essential spiritual impulses of the modern age, which began in the 15th century. Britain, for good and ill, has played a major role in shaping this modern age, in which, according to Rudolf Steiner, the British people and the other English-speaking peoples who proceeded from them play a vanguard role.¹ However, the failure of the British elite to be able to enforce its will in the Suez crisis of 1956 was the final sign of the end of Britain’s first phase of activity in this modern age. It was a phase of assertive commercial expansion and of aggressive empire that began in the reign of James I (1603-1625) despite that most unwarlike monarch’s own fervent desire for peace. With the exception of pirates in the decades of British piracy, from c.1560-1730, it was not the British people but the British elite – the wealthy landowning class and their allies, the rich merchants of the City of London – that forced its will upon the world from 1600-1900 and pushed and dragged the common people of Britain to fight its wars and conquer and occupy foreign lands, just as the common people of England had in earlier centuries been pushed and dragged into centuries of war on the Continent of Europe by their overlords, the feudal aristocracy of England. In the English Civil Wars (1642-53), many English people felt that enough was enough; they wanted a new dispensation, an end to the age-long tyranny of monarchs and lords, most of whom had never been English in any case but whose origins were Norman or French. In the famous Putney Debates between soldiers of the New Model Army of October-November 1647, in the speeches and writings of Col. Thomas Rainsborough and John Lilley, and in the tracts and deeds of radical groups such as the Levellers, Diggers and Quakers could be heard and read the new spirit, the new will of individuals in England for freedom. It was a will that stemmed from the impulse of what Steiner called the Consciousness Soul, the impulse of the individual to take responsibility for his or her own life, to become autonomous and conscious of what was going on in his thinking, feeling and willing, to find his or own path to the divine and to realise him/herself as a spiritual being and with other such individuals to create a new community, a commonwealth.

England’s loss of nerve

The English people managed to overthrow their king who had waged war against them, and they established the first English Republic, the Commonwealth, but then they rapidly lost first their way in the political troubles of the new state and then their nerve when the Commonwealth’s dictatorial leader, Oliver Cromwell, died in 1658, only nine years after the execution of King Charles I. At that critical point occurred something which has been obscured and largely forgotten in British history ever since. A single man, George Monck (below), who was the only general in the country at the head of a strong army, having conducted secret negotiations with the exiled Prince Charles, the son of Charles I, decided to overthrow the Republic.²

Monck had marched his army down from Scotland to London, all the time concealing his intentions. In London he took control, and recalled the pro-monarchist MPs to Parliament, who promptly invited Prince Charles to return, which he gratefully did. The British people have forgotten the treason of General Monck who re-saddled upon them the entire Establishment of monarchy, lords and the Church of England. Why have they forgotten? Because the men with whom Prince Charles did his deal in 1660 were the same kind of men – just seven of them this time – who did another deal with ‘a prince over the water’, the Protestant Dutchman, William of Orange and his English wife Mary, daughter of the reigning monarch James II. The deal was that William should invade England and become king in place of his wife’s father, James, but that William and Mary were only to reign not to rule. Real power would be exercised by the lords, landowners, City merchants and financiers who supported the invasion and who controlled Parliament. Such men, through their academic allies in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in subsequent decades and centuries, would also control the narrative of history and ensure that the usurpation of the Republic and of the Constitution through the machinations of a few wealthy individuals would be presented to the people as wondrous triumphs – the “Return of the King” in 1660, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 when William of Orange did indeed invade England and was crowned King in 1689. The key role of General Monck – who was made a Duke and an Admiral by a grateful Charles II  -– was forgotten. But by these events in 1660 and 1688, a sinister element of concealment entered into British public life. From this time onwards real power in Britain was no longer exercised by the monarch nor in Parliament, but around tables in the offices of the East India Company, in the City of London, and in the grand country houses of the landed aristocracy. This element of concealment is very much at work in the current debate over Britain’s future. There are those working more or less covertly to ensure that Britain does not leave the European Union and thus to frustrate and reverse the referendum vote of 23.6.2016, just as there are other, more chauvinist secretive groups which want Britain to leave the EU and then to move ever closer to the USA and the other English-speaking countries.³ Neither of these two agendas is truly in the evolutionary interests of the British people. The modern age is one in which we move beyond machinations by secretive elites to a world in which   autonomous individuals openly create new social arrangements through cooperation.

Two streams

The men who seized power by deception in 1660 and 1688  and those like them who have retained it ever since despite the emergence of ‘democracy’ in the interim were certainly individuals of a kind, and often very ‘enterprising’ individuals,  but their prime concern was for wealth, property, reputation and power rather than for freedom, truth and real community. And though such men acquired especial power in Britain, they were of course not to be found only in that country but across Europe and America. Rudolf Steiner said of them on 25.11.1917⁴: “In the main, there are two camps in opposition to one another: the representatives of the principle that had been overcome by the end of the 18th century, and the representatives of the present time…  [i.e. of the Consciousness Soul age  - TB] These are the forces that confront one another, the ones that are really doing battle in the world today. Rooted in the West there is the principle of the 18th, 17th, 16th centuries, which makes itself invisible by clothing itself in the phrases of the Revolution, the phrases of democracy, the principle which dons this mask and is striving to gain as much power as possible.” [emphasis – TB] The former American President, George Herbert Walker Bush, who died on 30 November, this year, 2018, was a man of many such phrases; on 11 September 1990, in the run-up to the first Gulf War, he declared the arrival of the “New World Order” in a speech before the US Congress. After his death, the mainstream media was full of obsequious homilies to him, but he was in fact a mass murderer whose government was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of foreigners in wars and coups, and he was also, like his father before him, a member of Yale University’s influential  secret society ‘Skull and Bones’ (founded 1833), which had provided a number of Presidents and other powerful Americans since the mid-19th century. A former CIA Director (1976-77), Bush’s membership of Skull and Bones was only drawn to public attention seven years after the end of his Presidency. His family also attempted to create, through his sons George and Jeb, a new Presidential dynasty based on blood and connections, in the old aristocratic style.

Since the 19th century there have been two elitist streams working more or less behind the scenes to bring about a single European state. Both of them look back to the Roman Empire, one directly, the other indirectly. Since the fall of the Roman Empire there have been powerful men in Europe who in one form or another have sought to revive the spirit of Empire as a centralising principle of order from above; they have included: Charlemagne, Popes Innocent III and Boniface VIII, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Alfred Milner, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill and Otto von Habsburg. Napoleon in exile said of his attempt to dominate Europe: “I wished to found a European system, a European Code of Laws, a European judiciary: there would be but one people in Europe… Europe thus divided into nationalities freely formed and free internally, peace between States would have become easier: the United States of Europe would become a possibility.”⁵  All this under the leadership of France, of course. In three significant speeches in 1946 (Zurich), ’47 (London) and ’48 (The Hague) Churchill envisaged a United States of Europe (USE) under the effective guidance of Britain and America. Coudenhove-Kalergi and Otto von Habsburg, the first and second Presidents of the Paneuropa Union (founded 1923) imagined and campaigned for a united Europe that would exclude Britain and Russia and would be guided by the spiritual traditions of the Roman Catholic Church, which of course reaches directly back to the time of the Roman Empire.⁶

In the English-speaking world, since the time of Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902 )and Alfred Milner (1854-1925), there have been elitists who see themselves as the indirect inheritors of the mantle of Rome. The British ‘public schoolboys’ (i.e. elite boarding school boys at Eton, Harrow and others), trained to administer the Empire, were brought up on the Greek and Roman classics; they were accustomed to see the Roman Empire as the source of light and order in the ancient world and Britain and the British Empire as the source of light and order in their own era. For example, Philip Kerr (1882-1940), 11th Marquess of Lothian and a key figure in the Milner Round table group wrote to another member of the group, South African general and twice Prime Minister of S. Africa, Jan Smuts, on 6 June 1939: “There have only been two long periods of peace in history. One was created by the Roman Empire. The other was the great Pax of the 19th century which was created by the British navy. That is why I have always believed that the only foundation for world peace was close cooperation between the British Commonwealth and the United States for the restoration of the nineteenth century British system operated not only by Britain alone but the whole English-speaking world.”⁷ Quite apart from the historical inaccuracies of Kerr’s statements here – there was no great ‘Pax’ (N.b. Roman word) in the 19th century; all he means is that Britain, after the defeat of Napoleon, was not involved in any major European war, and he forgets the Anglo-French invasion of the Crimea in 1854 – what Kerr envisaged is something like what we now have in the “Five Eyes” – the military and intelligence collaboration between the five English-speaking countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) – that spy on the rest of the world and share intelligence only with each other. Frank Ashton-Gwatkin (1889-1976), a British diplomat (Eton, Balliol College Oxford) imagined in the 1930s the economic system of the future: “the future seems to be developing along the lines of large preferential groups [i.e. trade groups – TB]… If this is so, our consolation must be that our own particular group [i.e. British Empire Free Trade – TB] is the richest and most powerful. If we add the USA as our associate, then its future economic and even political influence will be the decisive factor in the 20th century.”⁸

Cecil Rhodes not only wanted the English-speaking people to reunite in a single state or political entity that would dominate the world for at least 200 years, as is clear from his last will and testament, he also wanted a secret society, modelled after the Jesuit Order of his day, to bring this about. This society eventually emerged as the Round Table group, founded by Rhodes’s chosen successor, Alfred Milner, in 1909. From this society came two sister organisations, two elite-run, extra-parliamentary, foreign policy think tanks that have guided British and American foreign policy since the 1920s – the Royal Institute of International Affairs (a.k.a. Chatham House) in London (1920) and the Council On Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York (1921). In America the CFR was long dominated by the Rockefeller family, which in 1939, as war was approaching, set up and funded (to the tune of $350,000) a group under CFR auspices called the War and Peace Studies project, the aim of which was to determine the nature of the post-war world and what America’s role in it would be. This private project was then taken under the wing of the State Department. After the end of the war, prominent Anglophile members of the American elite⁹ created the institutions and systems of the “international rules-based world order”, the informal ‘American Empire’ which all westerners have been living under since that time.

The USA and the United States of Europe

A key feature of this new American world order, already prognosticated by the War and Peace Studies project, was the plan to create a United States of Europe on the US model. In 1946 a CFR study team led by David Rockefeller produced a paper titled The Reconstruction of Europe. The following year, Senators Fullbright and Thomas pushed a resolution through the US Congress (both houses) that ‘This Congress favours the creation of a United States of Europe’. In March 1947 Life magazine, owned by CFR member Henry Luce, declared that “our policy should be to help the nations of Europe federate as our states federated in 1787.” On 18.4.1947 the most influential US media organ, the New York Times, carried an editorial titled: “Europe Must Federate or Perish”.

Such a united Europe under American auspices and control would, amongst other things, ensure that Europe would be a compliant market for American exports after the war. This was the prime reason for the much-touted ‘generosity’ of the Marshall Plan, an American aid programme initiated in 1948 and lasting four years ostensibly rebuild western Europe after the Second World War. To bolster its control over the half of the now divided Europe (between East and West) that it dominated, the US created NATO, a military alliance with various countries in Europe, in 1949. As  the American political news website Politico has correctly stated: “The US has relied upon the EU as the political and economic arm of its permanent military presence in Europe (NATO)”¹⁰. The aims of NATO were, in the infamous words of its first Secretary-General of NATO, the Briton, Gen. Sir Lionel Ismay Hastings, to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. In the late 1940s the newly-founded CIA, headed by Allen Dulles, poured a great deal of money into the fledgling ‘European Movement’ which was intended to promote the idea of a ‘United Europe’, especially among the young. The American elite looked to their favourite Frenchman to bring this United Europe about  -  Jean Monnet (1888-1979; see pic below)¹¹, who had had deep connections with the British since before the First World War when he was a very young cognac merchant in Canada selling his family’s cognac to the Hudson Bay Company.

The men he met from the company would open doors for him in London during the First World War, and his contacts there introduced him to their elite American friends, including Allen Dulles. Monnet’s rise was so rapid in elite Anglo-American circles that in 1919 he was appointed Deputy Secretary General of the new League of Nations¹² at the age of only 31 on the prompting of none other than the French wartime premier George Clemenceau and the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour. At the League in Geneva, Monnet worked closely with Arthur Salter, a very talented British civil servant whom he had worked with on allied maritime supply systems in London during the war. The two men saw eye to eye on many things, including on centralised, technocratic control of economic systems. In 1930, at the peak of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Paneuropa movement, which had been endorsed by the French Prime Minister Briand, Salter, who was close to the Milner Round table group, wrote a book titled The United States of Europe in which he advocated a system of European government copied from the League of Nations, with a “High Authority” subject to a Common Assembly, and a Council of Ministers and Court of Justice. It would be this model, drawn from Salter’s book, that Monnet would use for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1950, which he intended would be the first step towards a federal United States of Europe, as indeed it turned out to be. Even today, British politicians such as Dominic Grieve (Conservative, and a supporter of Britain remaining in the EU) maintain that until the Treaty of Maastricht in 1991 the EU was a purely economic arrangement and only then became a political project. But when one looks into the facts of what Jean Monnet and his American friends in the US elite and government actually said and did, it is obvious that right from the beginning in 1950 their intention was always to create a single European state, a United States of Europe closely bound to the USA – and this fact has been hidden from the British people all this time. It was hardly or not at all mentioned in the two referenda of 1975 and 2016. This has been a tremendous decades-long deception, far greater and more significant than the mendacious statements by some of the pro-Brexit camp during the 2016 referendum.

Seven years after the founding of the ECSC, the first phase of the project, Monnet and his continental allies, with help from his American friends, such as the Dulles brothers – Foster and Allen were now Secretary of State and Director of the CIA respectively – brought about the European Economic Community (EEC) through the Treaty of Rome, signed on 25  March 1957 in a Renaissance palace in the very heart of the ancient Roman Capitol. In the context of great fears over nuclear war with the Korean War looming, Monnet managed to get the ECSC approved in a devious fashion by presenting the plan for it, which had been drawn up entirely by him and his co-workers, to the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and getting Schuman to present the plan to the Cabinet as his own. To this day it is still known as the Schuman Plan when in fact it should be called the Monnet Plan. But Monnet always preferred to work behind the scenes, away from the limelight.

Richard J. Aldrich of the University of Nottingham (UK) showed in 1997 how “over  three  million  dollars between  1949  and 1960,   mostly  from  US government  sources,  was  central  to  efforts  to drum  up  mass support  for  the  Schuman  Plan,  the  European  Defence Community  and  a  European  Assembly  with  sovereign  powers.  This covert   contribution   never   formed   less   than   half   the   European Movement’s budget and, after 1952, probably two-thirds.  Simultaneously they sought to undermine the staunch resistance of the British Labour government to federalist ideas.”¹³ Aldrich also notes the close involvement of US intelligence circles (CIA) in US backing for the European Movement fronted by Churchill and his son-in-law Duncan Sandys and for Monnet’s Action Committee for the United States of Europe: “The conduit for American assistance was the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), directed by senior figures from the American intelligence community. This body was organized in the early summer of 1948 by Allen Welsh Dulles, then heading a committee reviewing the organization of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of the National Security Council (NSC), and also by William J. Donovan, former head of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). They were responding to separate requests for assistance from Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, a veteran Pan-European campaigner from Austria, and from Churchill. ACUE worked closely with US government officials, particularly those in the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) and also with the National Committee for a Free Europe. […] the most striking aspect of the work of the American Committee On United Europe work is the extent to which officials working for European reconstruction and unification shared the experience of wartime intelligence, special operations and resistance. It is also particularly striking that the same small band of senior officials, many of them from the Western intelligence community, were central in supporting the three most important transnational elite groups emerging in the 1950s: the European Movement, the Bilderberg Group and Jean Monnet’s Action Committee for a United States of Europe.”¹⁴American money from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations was funnelled to ACUE and then “discreetly by the CIA on to …. organizations supporting European federalism such as the Council of Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the proposed European Defence Community (by the mid-1950s, ACUE was receiving roughly US$1,000,000 per year)”.¹⁵

An article in The Daily Telegraph on 19 Sept. 2000 was one of the very few  media reports in the UK on this secretive American dimension to the development of the EU project, a dimension that was never referred to during the EU referendum campaign by prominent supporters of either Leave or Remain: “The State Department also played a role. A memo from the European section, dated June 11, 1965, advises the vice-president of the European Economic Community, Robert Marjolin [a close partner of Monnet – TB], to pursue monetary union by stealth. It recommends suppressing debate until the point at which ‘adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable’.”¹⁶ A study of Monnet’s autobiography makes perfectly clear that he was no democrat but a technocratic man of the elite: “I have never believed that one fine day Europe would be created by some great political mutation and I thought it wrong to consult the peoples of Europe about the structure of a Community of which they had no practical experience.”¹⁷ He placed no faith in individuals but only in institutions which, he said, shape mens’ minds and behaviour. In 1966 he wrote a kind of personal “credo”; here are some of its principles: “1.Liberty means civilisation 2. Civilisation means rules and institutions. And all that because the essential objective is to develop mankind, not to proclaim a fatherland. 5. We must maintain our civilisation, which is so much ahead of the rest of the world. 7. We must organise the collective action of our civilisation. How can that be done? Only by uniting in collective action Europe and America, which together have the greatest resources in the world, which share the same civilisation, and which conduct their public affairs in the same democratic manner.” 8. This organisation, while seeking a state of coexistence with the East, will create a new world order and at the same time make possible the necessary and unconditional aid and support that our civilisation [i.e. USA/USE], which must be preserved, will bring to the rest of the world.”¹⁸

On the question of member states leaving his European project, Monnet wrote in a press release on 3 July 1950: “The withdrawal of a State which has committed itself to the Community should be possible only if all the others agree to such withdrawal and to the conditions in which it takes place. This rule in itself sums up the fundamental transformation which the French proposal seeks to achieve. Over and above coal and steel, it is laying the foundation of a European federation. In a federation, no State can secede by its own unilateral decision [cf. American Civil War 1861-1865 - TB]. Similarly, there can be no Community except among nations which commit themselves to it with no limit in time and no looking back.”¹⁹ The Eurocrats’ attitude had not changed 40 years later. Jacques Attali, adviser to French President Mitterand and one of the drafters of the Maastricht Treaty [1991] said on 24.1.2011: “All those such as myself who had the privilege of holding the pen to write the first version of the Maastricht Treaty had really committed ourselves to ensuring that an exit would not be possible. We carefully forgot to write the Article that would allow a [member state] to secede. That’s not very democratic but it was a great guarantee for making things more difficult, so that we would be forced to move forward”.²⁰

Superstate?

The deeper one looks into the EU project, the more one realises that it has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with the machinations of secretive elites and their obsession with the realisation of their dream of a single European state. Whereas Napoleon’s dream was of a French Europe, the Eurocrats’ dream is of an American Europe, the kind of Europe enthusiastically imagined by a close collaborator with Cecil Rhodes in the 1890s, the English radical journalist William Thomas Stead (1849-1912), whose book The United States of Europe was published in 1899 and his The Americanisation of the World (see below left) appeared in 1902, the year of Rhodes’ death and the year of the founding of the Pilgrims’ Society, the most prestigious Anglo-American elite club. Despite all the  talk of ‘diversity’ these days, Europe over the past several decades, indeed, over the past century, has steadily become ever more Americanised, ever more ‘one-patterned’ in music, food, fashion, business, the arts and architecture. Steiner was already noticing it in his day, commenting on the ‘American’ atmosphere of cities like Hamburg and Berlin.

This article has focused on the drive towards the EU coming from the West, from Britain and America, and especially from the economic forces in those countries. But there has also been a drive to the EU coming from a Roman, traditionalist and authoritarian direction, i.e. the more direct Roman heritage mentioned earlier. This involves, besides Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Paneuropa Union, groups such as the Synarchists, the Bilderberg Group, and Le Cercle²¹. (My article in the Spring 2019 issue of New View will discuss these). The Anglo-American elites sidelined Coudenhove-Kalergi after 1945 in favour of Jean Monnet, not only because they knew Monnet better, for nearly three decades already, and because his more modest, business-like and charming approach was easier to get on with than Coudenhove-Kalergi’s loftier, more aristocratic manner, but also because Monnet was a man of business who understood economic life. In that sense, he certainly was more a man of the modern age, for, as Steiner stated, we live in this Age of the Consciousness Soul, this 5th Post-Atlantean epoch (1413-3573²²), and in this epoch it is the economic aspect of social life that is the prime focus. In the previous age, the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Roman time (747 BC -1413 AD), it was the political sphere, the age of kings and warriors, and before that, the 3rd Post-Atlantean epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch (2907 BC -747 BC), the age of the cultural/spiritual sphere, was the age of priesthoods and god-kings. In our epoch today, economic life is seeking to become independent of political life, and this process is still far from over. Coudenhove-Kalergi was no businessman; he was more a man of the previous (4th) epoch, a man of politics and culture. To his organisation, the Paneuropa Union, was left the task of organising the Council of Europe and of producing the symbols and signs of the emerging European superstate – the flag with its single colour and its single ring of identical stars, the anthem, the tasteless appropriation of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy theme from his 9th Symphony (we can recall Beethoven’s distaste for Napoleon’s Europe!). But in our epoch, the nature of economic life is the main problem: how to make economic life ethical, moral – fraternal and cooperative, based pre-eminently on service, serving people’s needs and not on the political principle of the 4th epoch (equality/inequality) or the cultural/spiritual focus of the 3rd epoch, which in our epoch, as with Wycliffe, Hus and Luther (14th-16th centuries), manifested in the demand for spiritual liberty – the freedom to worship as one determines for oneself. Steiner insisted, however, that only when the cultural sphere – for example, teaching and academic research -  was truly free from domination by the economic sphere would it be able to use its conscious knowledge and insights to help the economic sphere find its proper basis.

As presently constituted, the EU combines old political thinking with a drive to link up with the modern economic power of the West, of America. The EU’s old political thinking is that of the unitary nation state, in which the national political class, through its bureaucratic, technocratic systems, claims the right to determine both a people’s economic life, although we live in an age of global economic activity, and to determine a people’s cultural development through control of the education system. This is 18th/19th century thinking and a hangover from the age of absolutist monarchs and governments. This combination of politics and economics, now on a continental scale, and which is now aimed at creating a European super-‘nation’ state, is what dragged Europe into the disasters of the two world wars of the 20th century. In those wars, for the sake of economic interests (often dressed up as political interests of rights, survival etc.), the unitary nation state forced its people into war against other peoples. If we are not careful, we are going to repeat those colossal errors if we allow Europe to be identified with the pseudo-nation state of the EU and to be conjoined with the USA and dragged by the USA, whether by Trump or some other US President, into conflict with the East, with the nuclear armed states of Russia and/or China. Europeans have already been dragged into America’s conflict in Afghanistan and have now also been involved (since 2014) in the Anglo-American ‘strategy of tension’ with regard to Russia.

In 1930, the year when the French Prime Minister Briand publicly declared his support for Paneuropa, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz (pic above), one of Steiner’s closest esoteric pupils, wrote: “Today Europe stands between America and Asia as Middle Europe stood between the western states [England and France] and Russia in 1914… . Pan-Europa, in the way it has been conceived, can at best become the image of a superstate, an organised theatre of war for a mighty conflict between America and Asia. It remains in debt to America and thereby has become an organ of American will²³ … America lets Europe play with national questions for a while like children, but in terms of economics, it has Europe, and especially the new small states [of eastern Europe] which behave so foolishly, within its power. The way in which England used to treat states in the pursuit of its own politics, America now repeats with continents. Soon the moment will come when it will line up all these militarily against Asia, under the well-known phrases of the Wilsonian variety or perhaps even on behalf of a Christianity that does not yet actually exist. Everything national will then be cleared away and sterotyped by America in a false manner with a demonic technical brutality. That is how the healing expected from America will actually look.”²⁴ [emphasis – LPH]

Everything that Polzer-Hoditz says here has happened. He was talking about the world of 1930 yet he could just as well be speaking of today, and of course he was not talking about the American people but about the American state, and the American elite that control it. Today Europe still stands between America and Asia, and there is a great danger of war because Europe is not truly between the two in such a way as to serve as a bridge and intermediary, but is standing with America against Russia and gradually, also against China. We thus have a new binary in world affairs and not a threefold picture. The EU has become the image of a superstate. Macron’s and Merkel’s recent call for an EU army – which Monnet tried to establish in 1954 already but was defeated by French resistance – is only the latest step on the road to this superstate. Europe remains in debt to America: the dollar is still the main reserve currency for global trade, and America demands that Europeans pay more to NATO for their own defence. Europe has become an organ of American will – in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, and now on the Russian border. The smaller eastern European countries – Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Bulgarians, Estonians and Romanians – are allowed to play with national questions, but when push comes to shove, America will demand they play their role in NATO against Russia. America has been dealing with Europe as a continent since the 1950s in the pursuit of its own politics. It is lining up European countries against Russia, placing missiles in some of them. Fine-sounding phrases about US foreign policy have issued from the mouths of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nikki Haley, the US ambassador at the UN. European national concerns are dismissed and stereotyped in Anglo-American media as delusional, populist, dangerous, Far Right, Fascist, while the Internet, in both its hardware and software almost entirely US-controlled, can exercise a “demonic technical brutality” in both personal relations in social media, and in fake news and state propaganda against other countries.

In November 1921 at a time of tension between America and Japan over the size of their navies, Steiner spoke of how a great war would break out between the West and Asia if the West insisted on creating relationships with Asia that were grounded only in the western concept of economics, which is based on the profit and greed of the individual. The West would have to relate to Asia in such a way that would speak to Asia’s ancient, and decadent but still surviving spiritual life. If the West could bring a new social impulse grounded in a modern spirituality that Asia can recognise from its ancient culture then there could be chance for harmony between East and West, he said; otherwise there would be war. Twenty years later, the truth of his words was borne out when Japan and the USA went to war.²⁵

Mercurial Middle

The Central European Rosicrucians of the early 17th century knew that the true way forward was the mercurial way of the Middle: mercury between salt and sulphur. Despite two world wars, Europeans have still not learned this lesson, for they are not in the Middle today; they have lined up on one side of a binary, the salty side. Or rather, their transatlanticist elites have lined them up on that side of the binary. A few spats between the EU and American administrations over trade or GMOs or Israel do not and will not change that fact.

In the Age of the Consciousness Soul, we are challenged to become as conscious as possible in our thinking, feeling and willing. It is only fully possible to become conscious in our thinking in this epoch of human development, though some people, such as those involved in martial arts, sports, dance and eurythmy can, with great practice, become much more conscious in their will than the rest of us. To be conscious in our thinking we have to beware, Steiner warns us, of ‘ghosts’ of past eras that may be present in our thinking – old thought forms brought over from previous lives or picked up in this one, unconscious nostalgia for ancient times – the ghost of ancient Egypt or the Roman Empire, for example. Such ghosts would seem to be moving in the thinking of the dreamers of the EU, which is a great artificial Pied Piper that will lead us all to disaster if we continue to follow it. Such a construct as the European Union cannot be ‘reformed’ as some fondly imagine, for the project itself is to create a superstate, a ‘new’ unitary nation state – that is, the very thing, the historical retrograde, that Steiner frequently said ought not to continue in the modern age and is contrary to the evolution of humanity.²⁶ The EU is a 19th century customs union, a protectionist club that is trying to exist in this age of global economy. Those in Britain who want the country to remain in it seem to have forgotten the bitter experience and economic hardship of their fellow Europeans in Spain, Italy and Greece – victims of the hubris of their own and other EU members’ elites who foisted the Euro onto those southern countries and bolted together in an artificial and political way economies that were widely divergent.

The EU, then, is not only the wrong choice for Britain; it is the wrong choice for the whole of Europe, including Britain. By contrast, social threefolding (see above, and the threefolding section of www.threeman.org), the 100th anniversary of Steiner’s public presentation of which comes next year, 2019, and which has been discussed many times in New View, is the right way forward for Europe, a continent which is itself, in its linguistic, religious, and historical experience, as well as its very geography – narrow in the west, expansive in the east and mixed in the middle – a threefold entity. The right choice is a threefold form of European association that allows Europeans to relate to the rest of the world freely in economic terms and in cultural terms but maintains national sovereignty in the political sphere, respecting each country’s historical experience. Brexit is therefore not just an economic question to be tackled on the basis of individuals’ economic self-interest but a spiritual/cultural and political question that concerns the next phase in the long history of Britain and its peoples. The British people have to decide whether they want to live in fear and be pushed around by fears projected by so-called political and media ‘clairvoyants’ who all seem to know exactly what the future is going to be like over the next 10-20 years if, for example, Britain exits the EU on 29 March 2019 without a deal arranged with the EU – hell, catastrophe, suicide, disaster, chaos etc. – or whether they will be courageous enough to realise that after 46 years of addiction to a certain drug, suddenly ceasing to take that drug may well be painful for a while at first, but is the surest way out of addiction and that when they come through any hardship that occurs, they will not only be able to stand on their own feet, autonomous, conscious, and ready to help other fellow Europeans do the same, but they also may well find their way to a better form of community through the cathartic crisis they have shared together.

In 1956 Britain’s imperial phase came to an end. Unsure of its new direction and lacking self-confidence, the country staggered, pushed by its deceptive elite, into the European Economic Community (today the EU). In 2016, after 4 decades of membership of this club, many Britons had experienced enough and decided in a referendum by a small majority (4%, 17.4 million) that they wanted out. The large minority that voted to remain (15.1 million) may possibly have been much smaller if those people had been well-informed by the media, the government or themselves about the deceptive origins and intentions of the EU, but they were not. Over the coming months, it is to be hoped that the people of Britain do not lose their nerve as they did in 1660, when they allowed the elite to drag them back into the old Establishment of Crown, Lords and Church, and instead, take the resolute step, not into but across the seeming abyss, which may yet prove to be no abyss at all, and then find a new role for the country in helping our old continent to play its proper part in this epoch, no longer as an imperial oppressor and commercial exploiter but as a mercurial intermediary between East and West.

Endnotes
1. See, amongst many other statements by Steiner on this subject, his 1918 lecture cycle From Symptom to Reality in Modern History (GA 185).
2. George Monck, created 1st Duke of Albemarle by Charles II, (1608-1670) and given many other honours by that king. He began as a Royalist officer then changed sides to the Parliamentarians, before reverting to the service of the Crown in 1660.
3.  The first group ranges from the barely visible Bilderberg Group and many other such transatlanticist elite groups, to the slightly more visible Best for Britain Group, headed by Eloise Todd and funded by George Soros, amongst others. The second group, more right-wing in nature, includes besides Nigel Farage, Conservative Party politicians like John Redwood, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Michael Gove, William Hague and the American conservative organisations that they are close to, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.
4.   See lec. of 25.11.1917 in R. Steiner, Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double (2004), p. 193.
5.  https://www.napoleon-series.org/research/napoleon/c_unification.html
6.  See: D. Gusejnova, European Elites and Ideas of Empire 1917-1957 (CUP) 2016,pp. 71-97. From 1921-1926 Coudenhove-Kalergi was also an active Freemason, a member of the Humanitas Lodge in Vienna.
7. M. Osterrieder, Der Welt im Umbruch – Nationalitätenfrage, Ordnungspläne und Rudolf Steiners Haltung im Erstern Weltkrieg (2014), p. 1632.
8.  Osterrieder, p. 1608.
9. For example, Dean Acheson, Secretary of State 1949-53; John J. McCloy, whose ties with the Rockefellers went back to his days at Harvard): president of the World Bank 1947-49, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany 1949-52, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank 1953-60, and chairman of the CFR 1954-70; R.A. Lovett, Under-Secretary of State 1947-49, Secretary of Defence 1951-53; and the Dulles brothers: John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State 1953-59 and Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of the CIA, 1953-61.
10.  https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-dependence-on-the-us-was-all-part-of-the-plan-donald-trump-nato/
11. On Monnet, see: J. Monnet, Memoirs (1978); F. Duchene, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (1994); R.C. Mowat, Creating The European Community (1973); C. Booker & R. North, The Great Deception 2nd ed. (2016); M. & S. Bromberger, Jean Monnet and the United States of Europe (1969).
12. The League of Nations was founded in Jan. 1920 in Paris. Mainly a British conception, but strongly backed by US President Woodrow Wilson, its principal architects were Lord Robert Cecil and Gen. Jan Smuts, both of whom had close ties to the Milner Round Table group. From Nov. 1920 it met in Geneva. It was rejected by the US Congress in 1920 and proved ineffective in        dealing with international crises in the 1930s. Terminated in April 1946, its successor, also created by the same Anglo-American elite circles, was the United Nations, from October 1945.
13. R. J. Aldrich, ‘OSS, CIA and European unity: The American committee on  United Europe, 1948-60′,(1997) in Diplomacy & Statecraft, 8:1,184 — 227.
14.  See n. 11.
15. See n. 11.
16. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1356047/Euro-federalists-financed-by-US-spy-chiefs.html
17. J. Monnet, Memoirs (1978).
18. J. Monnet, Memoirs (1978).
19. J. Monnet, Memoirs (1978).
20.https://www.observatoiredeleurope.com/On-a-soigneusement-oublie-d-ecrire-l-article-qui-permet-de-sortir–c-etait-peut-etre-pas-tres-democratique-evidemment_a1632.html
21. For details on these groups, see: www.isgp-studies.com
22. Steiner dates these epochs following the destruction of Atlantis by the antediluvian flood. His dating system is ‘anchored’ in the year 747 BC, when Nabonassar became king of Babylonia, and accurate historical and astronomical records began.
23. T. H. Meyer, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz – A European (2014), p.268.
24. Meyer, p. 197. By ‘national’ here, Polzer-Hoditz meant national cultures rather than unitary nation states.
25. See lectures by R. Steiner of 6.11.1921 (GA 208) and 24.11.1921 (GA 209).
26. See R. Steiner lecture 7.12.1918 in The Challenge of The Times (GA 186) and chaps. 5 and 6 in The Social Future (GA 332a).

Terry Boardman

One of the major features of human development over the past 100 years has been the relationship between nationalism and what is variously called ‘internationalism’, ‘supranationalism’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’. First, the difference between these latter three terms should be clarified. Internationalism simply organises cooperative relations between nation states while recognising that the basic unit remains the nation state. The League of Nations, founded in 1919, and its successor, the United Nations (1945) are examples of this. But among the founders and ardent supporters of those two organisations there were already those, however, who believed that the age of nation states is past and that we should be moving to merge nation states into a supranational order of states on a continental basis and eventually, a single world state. The EU represents such a project; it has become the model for other such continental ‘unions’ and blocs – the North American Free Trade Area (1993), the African Union (2001), the South American Union (2008).These are currently international organisations, but the direction of travel is towards supranationalism. In a speech in 1947 (14 May, London) Winston Churchill made it clear(1) that he regarded a  “United States of Europe”, as the “indispensable first step” towards an “authoritative, all-powerful world order”, an “effective World Super-government”. In a supranational order, the nation states are no longer be fully sovereign and independent; they surrender full sovereignty for the sake of the perceived advantages of belonging to the larger collective. The third term, ‘cosmopolitanism’ (from the Greek kosmos and polis) is less narrowly political than the other two; it does not refer only to states and is more cultural and wide-ranging. It recognises that within a certain geographical or even mentally conceived area there is a diversity of views, behaviours and lifestyles rather than a homogeneity.

Over the last 120 years or so there has been considerable tension between advocates of nationalism, internationalism and supranationalism. Extreme nationalists (super- or ultra-nationalists) reject both internationalists and supranationalists and any attempt to weaken national sovereignty; they are even suspicious of cooperation between nations. Internationalists reject nationalists as outmoded; some think the time is not yet ripe for supranationalism and others look forward to moving from internationalism to supranationalism; while others again believe supranationalism to be a utopian delusion. Convinced supranationalists reject nationalism outright and consider internationalists are too timid and conservative though they may be prepared to work with them in order to draw them over to supranationalism. Extreme supranationalists would like to see a One World government as soon as possible. In recent years, in response to the phenomenon of economic ‘globalisation’, which has been driven especially by supranationalistically-minded people in transnational corporations who put their own or their companies’ economic interests before their own nationality, there has been a widely recognised resurgence in the form of populist or (neo-) nationalist movements. Meanwhile, against this historical background of developments since approximately 1900 and in contrast to narrowly political and economic developments, what could be called a cosmopolitan mood has steadily been growing across the world, especially in the cultural sphere of life, the arts and sciences, the media and so on.

The Growing Child

To try to understand all this, it may first be helpful to look away from the abstract  ‘isms’ and towards an analogical process that happens in the life of the young human being. The young child is completely dependent on his parents. They structure his life and to a large extent may form his view of the world. Their religion, philosophy, or way of understanding the world becomes his. If they are sports fanatics, he too may well become one. He is with his parents almost all the time; they constantly watch over him, keep him safe, and tell him what to do and what not to do. The family is the centre of his world; we can say that it is his cosmos, and that its principle is oneness (assuming the parents do not divorce and the family breaks up when the child is still young, which is sadly an all-too common experience. But from the age of 5 or 6 when his parents first take him to school, or (worse) when his parents already give him his first mobile phone, he is suddenly exposed to a very different ‘environment’ which has its own structure and explicit rules. His world and his mind are suddenly expanded; he is now subject to different authorities – those of the teacher or of the system of online networks and Internet companies. His world bifurcates; there is now home and not-home: the authority of parents and of teachers, or the ‘authority’ of the Internet. He has entered into a state in which the principle is that of twoness, duality, and the growing child has to find his way though this. The result is that by degrees, very slowly in most cases, though faster in others – for example, where his family breaks up, his remaining parent becomes addicted to drugs and he, at the age of say, 10 or 12, has to become the pillar that holds the family together – the child begins to move from being a member of group, and subject to the authority structures of that group, to becoming an autonomous individual. Society tells him that at 18, he is legally autonomous and that his parents have no further claim over him. He is no longer subject to them. But he is now, as it were, fully subject to the State: amongst other things, the State now legally recognises his right to have sex, procreate, marry, be employed, establish a business, drive a car, have his own passport, fight for the State and vote in elections that select the government of the State. Having left his family, as it were, already when he entered the State-sponsored and supervised school he enters into a complex relationship with his country and with its State. He now has a ‘stake’ in society.

In the meantime, however, our young person has become – it is to be hoped – not just a legally autonomous person, but an inwardly autonomous person in that she has developed her own ideas, learned to think for herself and to decide on the values that she chooses to uphold. Our modern society assumes that by 18 a child has become an adult, an individual. In fact, however, in various ways, this legally autonomous young person may not yet be truly autonomous but may still cleave to group affiliation in certain ways. She may still live with her parents and still feel inwardly dependent on them; she may still be a devoted member of the church in which she was brought up; she may still be a keen supporter of the football team her father introduced her to at the age of 8; she may be an ardent fan, along with millions of others,  of a certain pop celebrity or  equally, she may be a fanatical member of a radical political group that provided her with a psychological support system when she was alone in her first year of university. In other words, in her late teens and early twenties, she still has one foot in the former world of ‘oneness’, of the group collective, and one foot in the new world of individual autonomy. This is a further development of the state of ‘twoness’ into which the young person entered when he or she first started school education.

Often, as the twenties go on and pass into the thirties, the young person moves increasingly out of the former group affiliations and more fully into the new world of individual autonomy, but as a society, as a culture, though we pay lip service to this individual autonomy, we can by no means say that this movement has truly become the norm. Many people still go through their adult lives without parting from the old affiliations they made in their childhood, adolescence or early adulthood. Many remain more or less fixed, as it were, where they were around the age of 18-21. Their political views, their artistic and cultural choices, their attitude to life in general may not change much after that. They may think, at, say, 35 or 50, that they are autonomous adults, but in fact, in various ways, they have not moved on from that state of advanced ‘twoness’ or duality that they were in around the age of 21.

In late adolescence and especially when young people leave home, it is often the case that their idealism changes and their former religious or political worldview, which may have been based on their parents’ religion or political convictions changes and expands to become something much broader that takes in more global concerns, especially today when technology enables young people to make contacts around the world and to gain information so easily. They may become passionately concerned about the global environment, for instance, about solidarity with developing countries, or with the work of the United Nations. These concerns may reflect their own expanding consciousness as a result both of leaving home, coming into a larger environment such as a big city, a university or company, and of developing their own thinking or responding to their own feelings. But the young person is still in a form of ‘twoness’ -  the polarity of point (the ever stronger sense of self) and periphery (the awareness of global issues and needs). Many young egos of the more idealistic nature expand in such a way that they want to identify with the entire world; their natural egotism embraces the world; this was once expressed by the rock musician Jim Morrison of the American band The Doors who said: “We want the world and we want it now!” Rather than just hedonistically wanting to experience all that the world and life has to offer, which is probably what Morrison had in mind, many young people today feel the urge to serve the whole world or humanity in some way. This can be admirable but it can also lose sight of the third element that is missing between the individual point and the global periphery. This third element is the local or national community.

Nationalism and Individualism

To return now to where I began – nationalism and cosmopolitanism – when we look at the broad span of historical development, we can see that over the past approximately 10,000 years since the last Ice Age human social organisation unfolded from what we could call the small, all-embracing, all-determining cosmos of family, clan and tribe through the stage of kingdoms based on the family model (royal bloodlines) and then ever larger empires derived from those kingdoms. Those empires, which were larger cosmoses, were still based on the principle of oneness (e.g. the empires of the Pharaohs, of Persia, Rome, China, Japan, Byzantium, and Mesoamerica).The Emperor in China, for example, was regarded as the Son of Heaven, in effect, a demigod and his people lived within the impulses that rayed out from the imperial throne; their entire lives were framed by these impulses. In most cases, however, these old empires eventually decayed and broke down. In Europe, the last great empire of the old type of oneness or universalism, was that of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1519-1555), who ruled much of Europe and the Americas. In his lifetime, however, the new principle of nationalism was emerging, symbolised by Charles’ two main foreign rivals, king Henry VIII of England (1509-1547) and king Francis I of France (1515-1547). Whereas Charles and subsequent Holy Roman Emperors remained faithful to the universalist Roman Catholic church, its precepts and objectives, the rulers of England and France increasingly went their own national egocentric way to the point where, in the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century (1618-1648) French foreign policy was guided for decades by two Catholic Cardinals, Richelieu  and Mazarin, in opposition to the interests both of the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy; Europe witnessed the spectacle of Catholic Cardinals directing French armies into battle against the Catholic forces of the Catholic Empire. This was done in the name of the French state, but it actually expressed a new French national consciousness, at least among the upper echelons of society. A form of Catholicism even emerged in France, called Gallicanism, that was coloured by this national consciousness. It was “the notion that national customs might trump Roman (Catholic Church) regulations”(2) (and it was the closest that France came to the separation from Rome of the Anglican Church of England.

This new nationalism reflected the breakdown of the old universalist cosmic order of kingdoms and empires and the rise of individual consciousness since the late 15th century. Explaining this development is a complex matter but suffice it to say that it reflected the fact that Europeans had passed through what can be called the puberty crisis of their own culture (14th and 15th centuries) and had entered the first stage of late adolescence; they had entered that stage which in the individual young person is seen around the age of 16 when young people begin to separate inwardly from their parents. Nationalism, national consciousness accompanied and helped to birth the new age of individual consciousness that emerged in Europe out of the Middle Ages. It represents an intermediate stage as individual cultures became self-conscious vis-à-vis other cultures and affirmed themselves egocentrically (the word is used here descriptively and not pejoratively) against the ancient universalist authority of Pope and Emperor, who provided what can be described as the ‘parental’ framework for European civilisation. The ‘parents’ of this ‘Christian’ Europe were the Emperors and the Popes, and we see at the very beginning of this process in the Christian world, Christ Jesus standing condemned between an ‘emperor’ and a ‘pope’. Pontius Pilate was the representative of the Roman Emperor, and Caiaphas was the ‘pope’ of the Jewish religious life of his day, a representative of ancient Asian spiritual life. From the 15th century onwards, Europeans (e.g. the Lollards in England, the Hussite proto-Protestants in Bohemia, and Martin Luther and the other German-speaking reformers) began to rebel against these ‘parents’, the Emperor and the Pope, and insisted on going their own way; each one wanted to become the ‘Emperor’ or ‘Pope’ of his own life. Out of this rebellion would come nationalism and individualism.

Rudolf Steiner describes this complex process in his lectures published in English under the title From Symptom to Reality in Modern History (GA 185, especially lectures 1-3). Nationalism and individualism accompanied each other, but Steiner points out that they came from different places. Individualism is that which stems from the individual human soul, “the inmost depths of [man’s] being”; Steiner links this with “the impulse of Christianity”, meaning not the Christian church as such, but the Christian spirit, the impulse and model of Christ Jesus. This new sense of the young assertive egoic personality can perhaps best be felt in the giant portraits of themselves that rulers and the wealthy commissioned in the late 16th and throughout the 17th centuries. Such bombast had rather gone out of fashion by the 19th century. Even portraits of Napoleon do not have that lofty haughtiness  that is so often in seen in portraits of ‘bigwigs’(3) about a hundred years earlier.

Nationalism, on the other hand, is a modern, usually abstract and intellectualised form of the old naturalistic group heredity impulse: “as a member of a national group, man creates nothing of himself; he merely underlines the fact that, in a sense, he has developed naturally like a plant, like a member of the natural order”(4), a product of ‘blood and soil’, as it were. Nationalism is a hangover from the old cosmos of group identity that has appeared as an intermediary between the old social unitary cosmos and the new culture of individualism. Steiner shows that the relationship between nationalism and individualism took different forms in France and England, a difference which would have a huge impact on subsequent world history, through colonisation and imperialism, because “like the trade winds, the national impulse flowed from West to East”; the colonised peoples would imbibe this new modern nationalism from their colonisers. In England, says Steiner, the national element was predominant and in France the personal. This led the national element in France to turn inward; in France, “the national element tends to transform the inner being of man, to make him other than he is” whereas “in England [and by extension we can perhaps say also ‘in the English-speaking world’ - TB] the personal element transcends nationalism and seeks to embrace the whole world and to promote everywhere the development of personality. The Frenchman wishes rather to develop the personal element in the soul , the Englishman to extend the principle of personality to the whole of mankind…In the one case the national element turns inwards, towards the individual soul; in the other it is directed outwards, towards the soul of mankind.”(5)

However, a more literal English translation of the penultimate sentence in the above quote from Steiner differs somewhat from the German original, which is: Der Franzose will mehr zum Erzieher des Persönlichen in der Seele werden, der Engländer will zum Kolonisator der ganzen Menschheit werden mit Bezug auf die Einpflanzung der Persönlichkeit: “the Frenchman wants more to become the educator of the personal [element] in the soul; the Englishman wants to become the coloniser of the whole of mankind in regard to the implanting [or instilling] of personality”. In other words, the French national element leads the French to educate the personal element in their own souls, while the English national element leads the English to seek to colonise the world with personality. This contrast of ‘educator’ and ‘coloniser’ is instructive. The French national element seeks to change the personal within the soul, and within France itself. This helps to explain the strong French affirmation of their national culture with which they feel so personally identified and which fortifies their resistance to what they l’anglo-saxonisme  or l’anglobalisation. The English national element seeks not to change the personal but to expand it out into the world. A question that arises here is: are the English (and Americans) concerned to project personality as such out into the world or to project their own individual personalities out into the world? The Englishman who does the former learns to respect and affirm the personality of foreigners in foreign cultures as well as the unique characters of foreign cultures; the Englishman who does the latter remains an expat abroad, learns little and seeks to have foreigners adopt English ways.

Empire and Cosmopolitanism

Many readers will recognise that the age of nationalism, which first began to show signs of itself in the later Middle Ages in France, Switzerland, England, Bohemia, Spain and Italy, reached a kind of peak with the First World War, which erupted when nationalist, imperialist and capitalist impulses exploded in an almighty clash. But this is already to mention two new impulses – capitalism and imperialism. Capitalism began to emerge in the 17th century with the early forms of the modern economy, such as the company, global trading companies, central banks, stock markets and early industrial developments. The urban economic sphere of society was unfolding in its own right, slowly asserting itself vis-a-vis religion and the State. This new capitalism financed colonisation, which was also made possible by the new scientific and technological developments that had been prompted and stimulated by translations of ancient writings since the Renaissance. At first, colonisation, especially in the Protestant countries, was a matter largely of seeking individual profit, but by the early 19th century this more self-centred motivation was giving way to something more idealistic under the impact, especially in Britain, of an earnest Evangelical religious revivalism which led men to combine British nationalism with a sense, after the defeat of Napoleon, that the British must have become ‘the Chosen People of God’. The prudent and pedantic middle classes of urban Victorian Britain decided that mere profit and greed were not suitable motivators for imperial ventures. Macleod Wylie wrote in his Bengal as a Field of Mission in 1854: “When the contrast between the influence of a Christian and a Heathen government is considered; when the knowledge of the wretchedness of the people forces us to reflect on the unspeakable blessings to millions that would follow the extension of British rule, it is not ambition but benevolence that dictates the desire for [control of] the whole country. Where the Providence of God will lead, one state after another will be delivered into his stewardship.”(6) The mid-Victorian social thinker John Stuart Mill “saw the cultural transformation of the non-European world as inextricably linked to its economic transformation. These twin currents of the Evangelical desire to convert India to Christianity and the Liberal desire to convert it to capitalism flowed into one another, and over the entire British Empire.”(7)

Empire now came to be seen not just as something immensely profitable and good for the personal and national bank balance but as good for the individual and national moral ‘bank balance’, with the heavenly afterlife very much in mind. British culture was here at the stage of the young adult in his late teens driven by both egotism and an ever expanding idealism. These contradictory motivations are still with us today. How often have we not heard our politicians speak of intervention in another country’s affairs that will be of benefit to that country but also in our own national self-interest? In the last quarter of the 19th century other, less religiously ‘exalted’ Britons peered into the future and, influenced by the fashionable new creed of Social Darwinism and its dogma of ‘survival of the fittest’, felt that the country would only survive and compete with giant states such as the USA and Russia if it turned its empire into a single federated union. Natural science now ruled the minds of the educated, and science was based on quantity and numbers; size was what counted – large economic units. By 1900, thinking was global in all fields, in science, economy, philosophy, the arts and media. The books and newspapers  read by the literate readily directed their readers’ attention here and there across the world to the aerial achievements of the Wright Brothers, the philosophies of Nietzsche, Vivekananda and Karl Marx, the art of Gauguin and Picasso, the novels of Joseph Conrad, the ground-breaking work of Marie Curie or Gregor Mendel. It was the new cosmopolitanism, and yet, just as the burgeoning age of individualism had been coloured by the new spirit of nationalism in the 17th century, so was this new age of cosmopolitanism and empire on the eve of the 20th century also thoroughly permeated by the egocentric nationalist spirit, a spirit which had grown since 1600 to become omnipresent throughout European and American culture and was already spreading to Asia. This powerful nationalist wave now seemed to culminate; driving imperialism into a fatally arrogant, militaristic cul-de-sac, it crashed upon Europe in the form of the world wars of the 20 century, and seemed to crush the new nascent cosmopolitan spirit. After the apparent defeat of Fascism and Nazism in 1945, nationalism in Europe fell into quiescence, frozen by the Cold War, though in the colonial empires in Africa and Asia which had been less devastated than Europe by the two world wars, the momentum of nationalism continued until those empires were overwhelmed by it; one by one they gave way before demands for independence. These nationalist struggles in the developing countries began to inspire young people in Europe and America who were exasperated by the rigidities of their own societies in the Cold War period. Causes which had seemed long dead, forgotten or quiescent, such as civil rights for black people in the USA, Celtic nationalism, the struggles of the native peoples of America or the New Zealand Maoris, quickened into new life. In the 1960s interest was rekindled in ancient forms of art, culture and music in the West and in other such forms outside the western world. Signs of frustration with the conventional western political system and with the established form of capitalism became widespread; there was a huge revolt of the young in the 1960s across the world, a resurgence in extreme politics on both the Left and Right, and the beginnings of the feminist and environmental movements. The 1960s saw the beginnings of what we today call ‘identity politics’, in which people, especially younger people, focus on specific issues with which they feel personally identified or attached to, rather than on more general pan-social political issues as with the conventional political parties and themes of the first 60 years of the 20th century. In our time, with the growth of the Internet, this identity politics has rapidly spread around the world, especially in relation to gender and environmental issues, and more recently, in opposition to Donald Trump. Just as new technological changes played a key role in the development of colonialism in the 17th century, as mentioned by Rudolf Steiner in 1918 (see above), so have they facilitated the growth of this identity politics, from the globally synchronised Band Aid concerts of the 1980s in aid of famine in Africa and concerts in support of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela to the global scale of the anti-inequality ‘Occupy movement’ of 2009-2012.

Through these movements and especially via the Internet, many young people have come to see themselves as sharing global and cosmopolitan perspectives. The same slogans, masks, costumes, banners, chants, styles of protest and levels of   appear all over the world. This would seem to be ‘cosmopolitan’, but in fact most of them originate in the USA. Business practices, police and military techniques, pop music styles and Internet practices are now also increasingly broadly similar across the capitalist world, but again, many of them have their origins in a single country – the USA, so we can ask ourselves: how genuinely ‘cosmopolitan’ is all this? Yes, our supermarkets are full of products from all over the world, and we can pick and choose whatever food and drink we want and whatever music we want for our playlists; we can range across countless global TV stations and vicariously travel the world in near 3D quality without leaving our sofas, but how real and again, how genuinely ‘cosmopolitan’ is all this? Is cosmopolitanism merely a matter of quantity and consumer options? Eight out of the world’s ten leading media companies are actually based in the USA.(8) Our big cities may have districts or ghettos in which mostly first-, second- or third-generation immigrants from various countries live, but how much do the indigenous population personally interact with those people except at work, where they are obliged to do so? Nevertheless, there is no doubt that compared to 100 years ago, the West has indeed become much more ‘cosmopolitan’, at least in the big cities. Thanks to the revolution in communications technology since the appearance of the world wide web just 24 years ago, we are much more ‘globally aware’ than we used to be – if we want to be. From the old small scale cosmos of family, clan and tribe, then, social order has evolved through the old kingdoms and empires to state-nations and then nation states and new cosmopolitan empires or cosmopolitan nation states with larger or smaller immigrant communities and also to newer forms such as the European Union, which could be described as a new form of cosmopolitan ‘empire state’, in which states are created, or, in the case of the EU, are in the process of being created gradually by the elites that run them, by melding  nation states together with differing histories, cultures, religions, and languages. This is of course the difference between the USA and the USE that is under construction in Europe: the USA has a single history and language.

Individual – Nation – World

Rudolf Steiner pointed out that such is the nature of things in a world governed by dualism, the principle of twoness, that developments in one direction are invariably accompanied by those in the opposite direction. For example, after the French Revolution, when the old aristocracy of blood and family gave way before the democratic spirit in which individuals of all classes insisted  on being treated with dignity and justice as individuals, politics based on democratic parliamentary majorities gradually appeared all over Europe, but equally, a new form of aristocracy also began to emerge – that of the plutocrats of money, and this has come to the point today where a tiny percentage of the world’s population, the ultra-rich, a few billionaires, own well over half of the wealth of the entire world. People are losing confidence in the democratic system of parties and majorities; they sense that it changes nothing essential because the ultra-rich can buy influence through all kinds of leverage and lobbying behind the scenes, which the so-called democratic mainstream media avoid examining. Similarly, the cosmopolitan spirit was indeed growing around the turn of the 20th century (see above) but it was almost immediately being penetrated by special interests. For example, supranationalist organisations such as the League of Nations and later the United Nations were conceived and devised largely by people who served the interests of elites in a particular culture, namely, the Anglo-American. I have written about this in previous articles in New View. The cosmopolitan idealism and goodwill of many people was utilised and channelled in directions that served the particularist aims of these elites. The wars of the 1990s were an example of this, in the Persian Gulf (1990-91) and former Yugoslavia when the UN and NATO were used to attain certain Anglo-American aims. Rudolf Steiner said of these new, so-called cosmopolitan or supranational organisations:

“With the Wilsonian League of Nations institutions are created which are bound to lead to mischief and constant suffering, when abstract human desires are imposed on  facts;… when one frees up something that is free it must lead to peaceful development; if it is unfree, it must lead to warlike conflicts. One cannot create the future condition of humanity through institutions, as Wilson and the Entente want to do; it will arise when one frees up the facts through which it can emerge….”. It was not the unitary national states assembled together in the League of Nations that could realise a lasting post-war order, because they had been the very states “which had led mankind into this dreadful catastrophe.” Rather, through the threefold ordering of the social organism a foundation for inner liberation and development in a universal-human sense had to be experienced. “The liberated human being alone would be able to lay the foundation for the ideas, feelings and acts of will which have to be operative in a modern League of Nations.”(9)

Only free autonomous individuals acting within the three separate autonomous and interrelating spheres of modern human life – culture and spirituality, politics and law, and the economy – can liberate their societies, Steiner insisted; their societies and States can never truly liberate them. By “autonomous and interrelating” here is meant in the same sense in which the three physiological systems of the human organism are both separate and yet interrelate – the nervous system, the circulatory system and the metabolic system. This understanding, which is already an operative reality within the microcosm of the human organism, takes us to the third level of social organisation, which is actually coming about at the present time, but very slowly, and through great tribulations, as human beings learn only slowly in social affairs and can show great resistance and rigidity when faced by what is coming at them from the future. It is the level of Threeness. We have moved from the old cosmos of oneness and uniformity (the stage of the ancient empires) through the phase of duality and twoness, when nationalism and the egocentric individual emerged (1500-2000), to the  incipient third stage of the threefold society in which science, research and the arts will be open to the rest of the world (without it they wither and stultify), as will economic activity, since it is self-evident that we all depend on each other in the modern world economy: if there were to be no coltan(10) from the Congo, there would be no mobile phones) but politics and law within countries will be a matter for national communities, respecting and reflecting the evolution of the historical conditions of social life in individual countries. Culturally, we belong to the cosmos of the mind; politically, we belong to the feelings of the national community; economically, we belong to the body of the world.

The new social macrocosm, especially in a region as variegated as Europe, should not be a great unitary soup, either global or regional – a larger version of the unitary nation state, because, as Steiner pointed out, it was precisely such unitary nation states, in which culture, politics and economy were all mixed up and mutually interfering, and were above all subject to interference by the State itself, that “had led mankind into [the] dreadful catastrophe” of the wars of the 20th century. The ‘European Association’ of the future must first be one in which the three spheres of culture, laws and economy are separate and interrelating within each country and in which the spheres of culture and economy in each country are free to relate to their counterparts in the other countries in the Association (during the Cold War this was either impossible or very difficult) but in which each country’s legal/political  sphere will be sovereign in that country; here the national element must be preserved. This would mean, for example, that mass migration, as currently provided for and even encouraged by the EU economic principle of ‘freedom of labour’ in order to create the economy of a centralised unitary United States of Europe governed from a single political centre, would not be allowed, as it would radically alter and affect the social and political life of a member of the European Association. It should not be allowed that the egoism of economic agents should be permitted fundamentally to alter a country’s socio-political nature. But in any case, the essential reshaping of economic life in a threefold society would tend to forestall any tendencies to such economic egoism, as it would be realised that the purpose of economic activity is to cooperate in the service of one’s fellows’ needs and not just to maximise profits for oneself and one’s family or company.

No-one valued the cultural contributions of particular peoples and nations more than Rudolf Steiner and at the same time, no-one affirmed the importance of cosmopolitanism and mutual understanding between cultures as much as him. He pointed out as long ago as 191011 and never tired of repeating it thereafter that it is precisely in an increasingly cosmopolitan age like ours that we should take an ever keener interest in the national element, in other nations and cultures, as well as in our own because these are realities, just as individuals are realities and the world as a whole, humanity as a whole, is a reality. If we fail to be interested in this national element and neglect to pay attention to it, it can turn sour and negative. We saw the consequences in 1914 and in the 1930s, and we have seen them again since. Extreme nationalism (Fascism) and extreme cosmopolitanism (Communism, radical Islamism) are dangerous delusions in their different ways. The one would bind us to the unconscious instincts of the past in attachment to ‘blood and soil’; the other would seek to force us into a utopian, rigid system of super-rational principles governed by an all-knowing elite (the Party, the mullahs). There are those, either fearfully obsessed with the errors of the 20th century, or dreamers of a utopian world government, who would do away with nations altogether and dissolve them into ‘soupranational’ organisations. But this is not the healthy way forward, and would only create a new dualist polarity of point and periphery – the individual point and the abstract global periphery.

Individuals, nations, and the world – the interrelationships between these three are the fundamental facts of social life today. The true social revolutionary idea which Rudolf Steiner brought forward exactly 100 years ago this year – the threefold social organism – and the thoughts and actions which follow from it, are rooted in these facts.

Notes
1. The Cause of a United Europe, booklet published by  Conservative Group for Europe, London, 1996,
   p.25.
2. Professor John McGreevy, University of Notre Dame, USA
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallicanism
3. ‘Bigwigs’ is a term that has been applied to men of wealth and authority since the period 1660-
   1730 when it was fashionable for such men to wear long wigs, following the example of King Louis
   XIV of France. British chief justices, high court judges and Queen’s Counsel barristers still wear
   such wigs.
4. Lect. 1, GA 185 18.10.1918
5. See n. 4.
6. Niall Ferguson, Empire – How Britain Made the Modern World (2003), p.116.
7. Ibid., p. 141.
8. https://www.zenithmedia.com/google-takes-top-position-in-global-media-
   owner-rankings/
9. Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch – Nationalitätsfrage, Ordnungspläne und Rudolf Steiners
   Haltung im Ersten Weltkrieg (2014), p. 1402f. Transl. – TB.
10.https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/is-your-cell-phone-fueling-civil-
   war-in-congo/241663/
11.R. Steiner, 17.6.1910 in The Mission of Folk Souls  – in connection with Germanic-Scandinavian
   Mythology (1989), p.145.

This article first appeared in New View magazine Issue 72 July-Sept 2014

2014, a year rich in historical resonance: D-Day in Normandy 1944, seventy years ago; a hundred years on from the birth of Dylan Thomas in 1914; the deaths of Franz Ferdinand and his dear wife Sophie in Sarajevo that same year; the defeat of King Edward II of England at the Battle of Bannockburn by Robert the Bruce in 1314, which saved Scottish independence for nearly 400 years.  Yet Scotland is not Serbia and Britain is not the Balkans. What we call ‘nationalism’ is not the same everywhere or at all times. For example, the Austrian Rudolf Steiner, author of The Philosophy of Freedom (1894), spoke about the complex relationship between nationalism and individual personality in Britain and France since the 15th century in his lectures of October 1918 (titled in English From Symptom to Reality in Modern History), and on 11,12,13 October 1918 he spoke for the first time about the being Sorath, the two-horned beast associated with the number 666 that is mentioned in the Book of Revelation. At the very same time another Austrian, Adolf Hitler, began a long march to his nationalist dictatorship during the night of 13-14 October 1918, when he suffered gas poisoning and blinding in battle on the Western Front; he would later insist that the nation took precedence and required the individual’s total submission; the individual was nothing in comparison to the people. One ought not to say, however, that because nationalism appeared to be, literally, a de-structive force in Germany in the 1930s and in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, then what appears to be nationalism in Scotland is also merely ‘destructive’. Destruction, de-structuring, is a necessary process in biology and in human history; all things have their time. One could well argue that Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were in any case artificial constructs created to suit the requirements and the wills of the victorious Powers after the Great War and those of certain abstract-minded nationalists in those countries who had aligned themselves with those Powers. The two states were enabled to emerge because Russia and her western allies, Britain, France and, later, Italy, had made war upon the Habsburg Empire, a potentially cosmopolitan federative state in central Europe, and upon its ally Germany. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had then been deliberately terminated by the western Allies and their Slavic nationalist partners between 1918 and 1920. The Treaty of Versailles had been signed with Germany, on 28 June 1919.(1) 28 June was the very day on which, in 1914, a most carefully constructed international conspiracy had resulted in the murder by a 19 year-old Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip (Gabriel Prince) of the man who intended to transform the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs from one dominated by Austrians and Hungarians to one in which Slavs would share political control with German and Hungarian speakers. This triadic transformation of the Empire was the vision of the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand; it was a vision for ensuring the future of the polyglot Middle European state. Franz Ferdinand was not a man to whom many immediately warmed but he had a certain integrity; he sought to marry a Slavic (Czech) duchess, Sophie Chotek because he loved her, but her rank was too low for union with the imperial family. Despite tremendous opposition from the Emperor, from some of his own relatives and from the Court officials, Franz Ferdinand insisted on marrying the woman he loved.

Their marriage was accepted only on condition that it be morganatic, that is, Franz Ferdinand personally had to abjure, in a formal ceremony on 28 June 1900, all rights, titles and privileges for his wife and for their future children, who would not inherit the throne after Franz Ferdinand himself. His wife then had to endure the constant humiliation throughout the 14 years of their marriage of not being allowed to accompany her husband officially or of being recognised at all at any official events or even of having the same family name as him. The love between this very energetic Austrian prince and his gentle Slavic wife, could at least have initiated a metamorphosis of the ancient Habsburg Empire into a more modern Central European federation. But such a metamorphosis did not suit the purposes of certain men in St Petersburg, Paris, London and Belgrade, and so, on 28 June 1914, 14 years to the day after the  formal statement of renunciation of the rights of his wife and children, and 525 years to the day after Serbia’s great defeat by a foreign empire (Ottoman Turkey) at the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds, Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Habsburg-Lorraine, and Sophie Chotek, Duchess of Hohenberg, were killed by two bullets from a Belgian pistol supplied by a member of the Serbian secret society – the so-called ‘Black Hand’ – and fired by Gavrilo Princip outside Schiller’s delicatessen on Franz-Josefstrasse. A policeman almost managed to stop Princip firing but he was kicked in the leg by a young man who sympathised with Gavrilo Princip, a man named Mihailo Pušara, so Princip was able to fire his fateful shots.

The Forming of a Union
Just 37 days later, on 4th August 1914 at 11 pm GMT –  after a crisis that had burned for three weeks like a slow fuse but then, from 23rd July, sped towards explosion with a malevolent velocity – the United Kingdom declared war on Germany – the British Empire declared war on the German Empire, and the European war became a world war. The white Dominions of the British Empire (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa) were not consulted before the declaration – it was assumed they would go along with the decision of the Cabinet in London – and neither, of course, were the non-white peoples of the Empire; they would have had no say in any case, as none of them had a vote, as did no woman in Britain in 1914, nor 40% of adult males. The state that was declaring war on Germany had been in existence for only 113 years. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland had been formed in 1801 after a bloody suppression of the Irish rebellion of 1798 which had been inspired and supported by the French revolutionaries. Before 1801 Ireland had been a separate kingdom from “Great Britain” but ruled by the monarch in London, although from 1782 it had had its own Parliament, which was annulled by the Acts of Union (1800), and Irish politicians were now required to come to London. “The Kingdom of Ireland” had been a creation of the government of Henry VIII (1541). Before that, the Papacy had been the titular sovereign of Ireland ruling feudally through the “Lord of Ireland”, as the king of England was known. From 1603 until 1707 the monarchs who ruled from London wore three crowns, so to speak – those of England (including Wales), Ireland and Scotland. A completely independent kingdom until 1603, when its king, James VI (1567-1625), became King James I of England as well (1603-1625), Scotland remained a separate kingdom with its own parliament until 1707, when the merchants of Edinburgh and the Scottish Lowlands who dominated the Scottish political scene decided to throw in their lot with the English and opt for full political Union with England, thinking they would be compensated for their huge losses in the disastrous Darien colonisation scheme  of 1698-1700 (2). Scotland retained certain separate educational, ecclesiastical and juridical rights, but the Union was not widely popular north of the border; “Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, an ardent pro-unionist and Union negotiator, observed that the treaty was ‘contrary to the inclinations of at least three-fourths of the Kingdom’” (3) The English elite, meanwhile, were keen to prevent Jacobite exiles in France from using Scotland as a base from which to mount a restoration of the pro-Catholic Stuart (Jacobite) dynasty that had been ousted from England in the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688; this had brought the Protestant Dutch King William to power in England as King William III (1688-1702). In neither Scotland in 1707, nor Ireland in 1801, was union with England desired by the majority of the population; it was forced upon them. The same was true, of course, for the Welsh, the first of the three Celtic populations to fall completely under English control (1277-1283). Ironically, the victory of the half-Welsh Henry Tudor (King Henry VII, 1485-1509) at the end of the English Wars of the Roses did not lead to freedom for Wales; the second Tudor king, Henry VIII (1509-1547), simply incorporated Wales into England between 1536 and 1543 by “harmonising” the laws of Wales with those of England.

The French regained the port of Calais, the last English possession on the Continent, from Henry VIII’s daughter Queen Mary (1553-1558), and from 1558 until 1607, a period of just 49 years, England (or Great Britain as it became known after 1603), was now truly an island state. King James I, the 23rd crowned monarch since the Norman conquest of 1066, was the first monarch to rule over all the peoples of the British Isles. Under King James and his government, led by his Secretary of State Sir Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury (1563 – 1612) and first cousin of Sir Francis Bacon, the first British colony was founded at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, and ‘Great Britain’ embarked upon the path that would ultimately lead to world-empire. In those increasingly global undertakings over the next 300 years, the Celtic peoples of the British Isles played a very great part. Indeed, although Englishmen in the 19th century, such as Disraeli, often used to refer to ‘the English Empire’, it was very much a ‘British Empire’ and it is no exaggeration to say that without the multi-faceted contributions of the Celtic peoples, it would have been impossible.

We often think that the ‘English’ began this process, and certainly, it got underway, as indicated above, only after the English Crown had, in one way or another, ‘incorporated’ Wales, Ireland and Scotland. But how English was this process of incorporation in fact? English was not even the language of the courts of those kings of England who began the process of conquering, first Ireland (Henry II, r.1154-1189), and then Wales (Edward I, r.1272-1307), and who then attempted unsuccessfully to conquer Scotland (Edward I and his son Edward II, 1307-1327). These men were still very French in their language and lifestyle, but the ruling class at the head of which they presided had arrived in England in 1066 as Normans, who were in fact Vikings with but a thin veneer of French and Latin civilisation acquired over just three generations, since the conquest of Normandy in 911 by Danish Vikings led by their chieftain Hrolf (‘Frenchified’ as Rollo, 846-c.931). The Anglo-Saxon kings of England before 1066 had never sought to attack the Continent, nor had they even tried to conquer the Celtic lands of the British Isles. But after the new Norman elite had consolidated their rule over their newly conquered subject people in England and had indulged in their own Civil War,(4)  it was not long before they sought to conquer the Celtic lands as well, beginning with Wales in 1081. The invasion of Ireland began in 1171; the conquest of Wales was completed in 1277-1283 and the vain attempt to absorb Scotland took place between 1296 and 1314. (5) Repulsed by the Scots, England’s French-speaking elite then turned their attentions to their old homeland, France, and embarked upon the 100 Years’ War (1337-1453) in the ultimately vain effort to become the kings of France as well as of England. As stated earlier, the loss of the last gain from this particular struggle, Calais, led to the only period (49 years, 1558-1607) in British history since the Norman Conquest of 1066, in which the English Crown possessed no overseas territories beyond the British Isles. (6)

People and Geography: the Expansion of England
In the British Isles then, a particularly energetic and aggressive foreign group, led by those who were essentially Vikings in their origins, conquered England, then attempted to conquer the ‘Celtic periphery’ regions. They followed this by seeking to expand their territories on the Continent and finally, after being rebuffed there by French resistance initiated by Joan of Arc (1429-31) they gradually lost all English possessions in France (1431-1558), which culminated in that eventual respite, as mentioned, of 49 years with no overseas possessions. Rudolf Steiner was not the only one to point out that Joan’s deeds in the end served England just as much as France.(7) Steiner also encouraged us to become sensitive to the differences between on the one hand, what lives in a particular human population as the specific ethnic and human qualities of that people and on the other hand, what particular geographical energies are present in the territory in which that population lives – the nature of the earth forces below them, the nature of the climate,  topography, and natural features around them and so on.(8) This is especially important when we want to understand what happens to a people and to a country when, for example, a new substantial group  of immigrants move to that country. The very oldest elements of the population of ‘England’ had lived in the British Isles for millennia before the arrival of the Celts. After the Celts had come other settlers from the Continent, including the Romans and finally the Anglo-Saxons, who created seven kingdoms that were only eventually unified in the 10th century under the pressure of having to resist invasions by the Scandinavian Vikings. By 1500 the pre-Viking and pre-Norman peoples of England had internalised something of the Norman-Viking ruthless and acquisitive spirit – something which was actually very different from the gentler, more motherly being of the land and nature of England. Having internalised this acquisitive spirit, from the beginning of the 17th century, the English people, who by now  regarded themselves as a ‘nation’, resumed an aggressive posture towards the outer world after that 49 year respite (1558-1607) and by 1914 they had taken possession of a fifth of the world’s land mass and dominated its oceans – a very remarkable feat by any measure: the geographical ‘point’ that was the British Isles expanded to ‘embrace’ the entire global periphery and made a most significant contribution to the emergence of what is often today called a ‘global consciousness’.

After this huge expansion from the British Isles, something remarkable occurred as the First World War approached, a colossal symptom, one could say, of deeper historical developments. The background for this was the global expansion of England itself  (9) the preparations for which had begun c.1500 under the first Tudor kings, Henry VII and his son Henry VIII, with the exploration of North America by John Cabot (Venetian: Zuan Chabboto) and the founding of the Royal Navy. Although the British Empire reached its greatest actual extent in the 1920s with the acquisition of some former German colonies (SW Africa, Tanganyika, Cameroons, Togoland and several Pacific islands) it was in the 1880s that Britain’s global power began its slow decline in the face of the industrial and commercial challenge from Germany and the USA. The real period of the expansion of England thus occurred entirely within the era known since the 15th century in western esotericism as the Age of Gabriel (1525-1879, according to the German esotericist, abbot Trithemius of Sponheim or, according to Steiner, 1510-1879). There are seven of these archangelic ages, which are associated with the seven traditional planetary bodies and have been known since Babylonian times. According to Trithemius, each age lasts 354 years and 4 months. Each of the seven archangels exercises a specific influence on human history and works through particular peoples in order to exercise that influence during the era. The key feature of the recurring Gabriel periods of human history is a focus on material life and the material plane – everything that relates in the broadest sense with incarnation into material existence.

Titanic: Misunderstanding the Message
The “colossal symptom” referred to above was the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic, that great technological and social symbol of so much in the British civilisation of the previous 300 years.  It was built in Belfast, N. Ireland, that is, Ulster, the centre – since the time of King James I – of the Anglo-Scottish Protestant domination of Ireland. 33 years after the end of the Age of Gabriel in which Britain’s star of external power had risen so high, on 15 April 1912, the Titanic sank after steaming too fast and colliding with an iceberg on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic to America. Meanwhile, the issue of Home Rule for Ireland – we would call it ‘devolution’ today – a topic that had been bubbling for decades, now erupted with such force that between March and late July 1914 it seemed as if there would be civil war in Ireland. Fiery speeches were made, mass demonstrations held, guns were imported by both sides, Unionists and Republicans, armed groups were drilled. Unlike the Welsh, who did not rise in arms again after the Tudors gained the throne, the Irish had never in 750 years accepted English rule. A conflagration was avoided in 1914 only because the imminent civil war in Ireland was overtaken, from 4th August 1914, by the greater conflagration of the World War. The British government and Establishment breathed a collective sigh of relief. In his famous House of Commons speech of 3rd August which in effect announced – although without actually doing so – Britain’s imminent entry into the European war, the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey declared that “the only bright spot in the whole of this terrible situation is Ireland” (meaning that the coming ‘Great War’ would redirect attention from Ireland and defuse the situation there). But he spoke too soon, for the events of August 1914 proved to be only a postponement of the climax of the tensions in Ireland. The Irish had finally had enough of subjection to Westminster, England and the British Empire. The Easter Rising in Dublin of 1916, and especially Irish reactions to London’s brutal suppression of that Rising, signalled that the Irish now ‘wanted out’. Battered and exhausted by the trials of the World War, drained of its finances and suffering from the loss of so many of its own sons, the British Establishment no longer had the persistent and ruthless will to dominate, which it had always shown in centuries past throughout the Empire in suppressing rebellions and acquiring new territories. In 1922 London finally agreed to independence for a Republican Ireland.(10) Ireland, one of the first overseas territories to be violently assaulted by the ‘English’ (actually Franco-Norman) Crown (from 1171) was now the first to make its exit from that Crown’s Empire. What the British Establishment could not see or accept in 1914, it was now presented with again in the wake of the First World War, which it had engaged in for its own imperial purposes. Ireland’s exit from the Empire signalled the beginning of the end of the Empire and thus the closing of a chapter in the long history of the British Isles.

These three events – the sinking of the Titanic just before the First World War, pyrrhic victory in the war itself (in which there was such a cost to Britain with so many lives lost), and Irish independence after the war – all presaged the imminent closure of the chapter of Britain’s imperial history. That chapter  had been based on Britain’s control of the seas. Just as the enormous liners of the Titanic class symbolised the Edwardian bombast of Britain’s passenger ships, so too were the huge, so-called ‘Dreadnought’ super-battleships (first launched in 1906) of the Royal Navy the culmination of materialist bombast in naval warfare: their size and might were seen to reflect the Power of the Empire. Much hubris, as it turned out, for during the war they were put to the crucial test just once – at the Battle of Jutland (1916) – and were found wanting.(11) Not giant battleships but submarines and aircraft were the new weapons of the 20th century and in these Britain did not turn out to have the edge at sea. After the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the continuing diminishment of the Empire, the Royal Navy shrank drastically. Britain’s merchant marine also steadily declined in size as shipbuilding moved to the Far East and Britain’s shipyards could no longer compete. For example, “in 1939 the Merchant Navy was the largest in the world with 33% of total tonnage. By 2012, the Merchant Navy – yet still remaining one of the largest in the world – held only 3% of total tonnage.”(12) These were all outer signs that the chapter of British history which had opened c.1600, was now closing.

Four generations of Cecils: father and son, uncle and nephew

     William Cecil             Robert Cecil            Lord Salisbury            Arthur Balfour

However, many in Britain’s elite did not comprehend the message that they were receiving from the course of history itself, or else interpreted it very differently. In 1919, at the very time that the baton of imperial power was passing from Britain to the USA, powerful circles in the British elite connected to the Cecil family (e.g. former Prime Minister Arthur J. Balfour, nephew of Lord Salisbury, and Sir Robert Cecil, Salisbury’s son), and to Lord Alfred Milner and his Round Table Group (founded 1909), established the British Institute of International Affairs (1920, later renamed the Royal Institute of International Affairs – the RIIA – and also known today as Chatham House) following discussions in May 1919 at the Hotel Majestic in Paris during the Paris Peace talks. The Institute’s first formal heads were Sir Arthur Balfour, Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Edward Grey; Grey’s formal resolution called the institute into being. Those behind this Institute were closely allied to similar elite circles in the USA (notably the J.P. Morgan and Carnegie financial interests) who went on to establish the Council on Foreign Relations (1921), which both organisations regarded as a sister group to the RIIA.(13) These two transatlantic extra-governmental organisations have cooperated closely in coordinating and exerting influence on Anglo-American foreign policy since their foundations and continue to do so. Today these two groups stand at the top of the Anglo-American mountain of think-tanks, and together with many other such groups below and around them, are working to maintain Anglo-American global dominance through finance, military power, intelligence networks and global surveillance by, amongst other things, knitting together the USA with East Asia in trade and investment blocs (the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, or TPP – 2011) and with the EU (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement, or TTIP – 2013).(14)  Obviously, Anglo-American antipathetic relations with Russia and China are at the critical core of these geopolitical and economic manoeuvrings, not least in relation to access to natural resources, the material underpinnings of both ‘hard power’ (military) and ‘soft power’ (e.g. the metallic ore coltan and ‘rare earth’ metals needed in digital entertainment and communications technology and numerous other advanced industrial applications). A similar situation prevailed c.1900 when Britain and Germany were competing for the gold and diamonds of South Africa and the oil of Mesopotamia.

Modern Capitalism  – Back to the Future?
There has been no real change in the fundaments of Anglo-American economic thinking since the late 18th century, the time of the Scottish pioneer of political economy, Adam Smith (1723-1790). At a conference on ‘Inclusive Capitalism’ in the City of London in late May this year headed by Prince Charles, Christine Lagarde of the IMF and other luminaries of the global elite such as economist Larry Summers, Eric Schmidt (Google), and hosted by Lynn Forester de Rothschild of the Henry Jackson Society, The Economist,  and E.L.Rothschild, ‘crony capitalism’ was criticised but a return to the 18th century principles of Adam Smithian capitalism was held up as a solution to our 21st century problems. As long as such ideas remain dominant among the global elite, struggles between the egocentric economic interests of the world’s Powers are bound to continue, based as they are on the 18th century concept of economic self-interest. The radical spirit of the 18th century affirmed the notion of individual liberty in all areas of social life, and in parallel with this, evolution as a concept of change began to emerge but that concept has never been sufficiently and soundly extended to human consciousness and socio-economic practice in the West: hence the false claims in 1914-18 that a society that was actually still dominated by the aristocracy and the very wealthy (Britain) was somehow a ‘democracy’ defending modern liberty and modern economic life against a supposed primitive autocracy (Germany); hence too the back-to-the-future notion today that our economic troubles in the 21st century can be solved by a return to 18th century first principles, such as the American Tea Party recommends in the socio-economic sphere  – rather like economic Puritans in the Reformation calling for a return to the early church. This back-to-the-future attitude makes as much sense today as a middle-aged man in mid-life crisis trying to solve his problems by returning to the ideas and habits of his adolescence, whereas he will be able to move forward in a healthy way only by identifying and moving on from what is still adolescent in his middle age, not by embracing it anew as a solution. Steiner saw the economic life as a threefold relationship of producers, distributors and consumers and maintained that only as consumer is the human being rightly and inevitably egocentric in economic life, concerned for his own needs, whereas the other two actors in the economic process – the producer and the distributor  – are essentially there to serve the community in a fraternal and collaborative way. (15) Yet almost our entire economic practice in the West is based on the self-interest, self-assertion, and ruthless competition that were the discoveries and assertions of the 18th century, and we have enthusiastically spread these attitudes and practices around the world, and not least to the 2.6 billion people of India and China. The 18th century principle of personal liberty applied to all three aspects of economic activity is literally destroying our economy and our ecology today. The over-production and ceaseless growth of our economic processes are driven by the notion of the personal liberty of producers and distributors who are acting without sufficient thought for their social and ecological environments.

Scotland and Britain
Mention of Adam Smith brings us back to Scotland. The predominant  tendencies towards empiricism and materialism among ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ thinkers have played an important part in the development of Anglo-American political and economic thinking since the 18th century and contributed towards the philosophical basis of capitalism centred on self-interest, which led towards the Great War – from the economic self-interest of individuals to the economic self-interest of nation states. Given this major role of Scotland and its traditionally renowned education system in the intellectual underpinnings of western capitalism, as well as the vigorous role of the Scots in the expansion of the British Empire – everything from their high profile in the slave and sugar trades in the West Indies to opium trading, banking and engineering in the East Indies (in the 18th century the East India Company was “at the very least half Scottish”)(16) – it is again symptomatic that there is now, in 2014, 100 years on from the time the English elite failed to recognise the rumblings of coming independence in Ireland, a similar movement in Scotland. And once again, today’s English elite and its Scottish allies are seeking to suppress those rumblings, this time by recourse to anti-independence propaganda based largely on economic fear-mongering. This is because the English elite wish things to go on in the coming decades – and perhaps even centuries – as they have done for the last 500 years at least, since the time of Henry VIII but now on the global scale, with ‘governance’ headed by “as many billionaires as one can fit in a double-decker London bus” (according to Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England at a speech to the Inclusive Capitalism conference in the City of London, 27 May 2014) and by a small group of neo-feudal elite corporations and financial institutions. En route to this ‘new world order’, Britain would be a single unitary State ruled by a small elite of very rich men (and a very few women), a single source of political authority that sees itself as an aggressive world power with a self-bestowed right to compete against and dominate all other peoples in the world in the name of ‘national self-interest’, which despite its numerous claims to the contrary, has at root never been anything but the self-interest of the English elite. Hence the doctrine, shared by the leaders of all the main political parties (Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats) as well as by the newer, so-called renegades, such as Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP), of the need for Britain to “compete in the global race” against the mega-states of India and China, which are held up by the UK political class and the media as economic bogeymen to frighten the populace into running ever faster in that competitive race. Never is it mentioned that India and China are only running in accordance with the notions of economics and philosophy that those in the British Isles – English, Welsh, Irish and Scots – delineated some 250 years ago.

There is, however, a recognition in Scotland today that the chapter of British imperial history has closed; that the cooperation of England and Scotland in that particular enterprise has come to an end and that it was, moreover, a cooperation into which the majority of the Scottish people entered unconsciously, involuntarily or even against their will. And this has been the nature of so much in the relations between the four peoples of the British Isles since 1066 -  that they have been largely unconscious, involuntary or even compulsory and violent, serving predominantly the interests of ‘the English Crown’ and the English elite. Led by the Irish a hundred years ago before, during and after the Great War, the Celtic peoples of these isles now seem to be saying: “we seek in this time in history to take full and conscious responsibility for our own societies and that once again, as long ago, we will  no longer be directed by the English, from London, in the interests of the English Establishment and of the City of London.”

This is not a petty nationalist break-up of an historically artificial entity. It is the entirely natural and historical end of a chapter in the long lives and destinies of four neighbouring peoples. Of course, it is the case that over the centuries many of them intermarried, so that countless connections were created between the four countries, mostly unconsciously proceeding from the depths of personal destiny. What is happening now is that the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh are seeking to take conscious control of their historical communities through this modern process of discussing and debating their futures. After all, we are only some 600 years into ‘the modern era’ of the conscious self standing on its own spiritual feet before ‘God and man’, which began in the 15th century with the likes of John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Joan of Arc, Albrecht Dürer and Martin Luther, to name but five: the emergence of the modern individual who sought liberty and autonomy, first in his own spiritual or artistic life and then in his social relations and political life. Modern nationalism too began at that time in the complex interweaving between clan or national attachment and the new burgeoning personality. (17) In the British Isles there has been a tendency for the personal element to be stronger in England and the social or collective element to be more prominent in the Celtic periphery; socialism has always been strong in the three Celtic countries. It is not an accident that the Tory Party led today by David Cameron (who has a Scottish surname) has only one Member of Parliament in Westminster whose constituency is in Scotland, nor is it an accident that the Tories are weak in Wales and much stronger in England. This no doubt reflects those proclivities to self-will amongst the English that have something to do with the Viking and Norman settlers and conquerors who came among them a thousand years ago and more and also with those clannish, more collective sentiments that prevailed longer among the Celtic peoples of these isles. But as a result of all the intermingling with the English over the centuries, the more social Celts have been accustomed to individualism and as a result – not least of intermingling with the Celts, many English people over the centuries have become more socially aware.

From an anthroposophical perspective, whichever tendency one’s culture has, the important point is that one recognises one’s individual relation to it and takes responsibility for that. Our national communities are ‘garments’, so to speak, that we put on, or ‘houses’ within which we live in a particular life, and as such they are to be valued and cared for, for they serve to shape and form us to a degree and we can learn much that we personally need from living within them. Those garments or houses, however, have an objective life of their own. Like a piece of land or a garden, the culture of a nation and the land upon which that nation lives was nurtured and developed by those who came before us and will be so by those who come after us. Yet those garments or houses are nevertheless not us in our individual selves, our spiritual selves, for those selves pass through many such garments or houses on our path through material existence. We can cherish them and seek to be responsible for and in them but as modern people we can also be aware at the same time that we owe allegiance to none of them in any absolute sense. Our modern consciousness is that allegiance ultimately is owed to the family of mankind as a whole, to the planet as a whole which sustains all nations and territories, and to the cosmic spirit which sustains our dear planetary body itself.

It may well, therefore, turn out that if the Scots and perhaps later even the Welsh opt for independence from England, relations between the Celtic peoples and the English may become much more conscious and – dare one say it – ‘adult’. The English themselves will be challenged to rethink their destiny as a political community and open a very new chapter in their long story. A new, more modern and appropriate way of living together socially and politically, we may hope, will emerge between the peoples of these British Isles – one that better and more consciously reflects the differences between individuals and the differences between peoples and cultures as well as the similarities that we share as a result of living on (or offshore of) these isles that are themselves both distinct from, but also part of, the Continent of Europe. This more conscious, more adult way for ethnic, linguistic and regional communities to live together within historically bound regions of Europe may well be able to contribute to bringing about a more truly modern way of living together in Europe than the current European Union, which in so many ways is but the attempt to create another old unitary and uniform nation state on a continental scale – another retrogressive solution to the old conundrum of how the peoples of Europe can live together in peace and in a  manner that is both modern and sound. Just as Britain is not the Balkans, so is the 21st century not the 18th. Earthly spaces and times vibrate with their own particular sounds.

“The answer to 1984 is 1776!” declares the Texan radio host and anti-New World Order campaigner Alex Jones frequently via his Internet sites. But no, the answer to the global tyranny of 1984, which many today in 2014 fear may soon be upon us is not to be found either in 1776 or 1066 but here and now in the 21st century within ourselves, in our understanding of nature all around us  and the threefold human being: liberty in our cultural life; equality in our political life, and fraternal cooperation in our economic life.

Endnotes
(1) Germany had entered the war ostensibly in defence of its ally Austria-Hungary, and the German Kaiser Wilhelm II had been a personal friend of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand who had been  assassinated in Sarajevo on that same day in 1914.  
(2) A scheme to establish a Scottish colony in Panama. Between ¼ and ½ of all the money in Scotland was involved http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27405350
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Union_1707#Political_motivations
(4) 1139-1154 between King Stephen and his cousin Empress Matilda, daughter of King Henry I.
(5) It is of interest that the  College of Oxford University that is one of the two most associated since the 19th century  with the British Empire – Balliol College – was founded c.1263 by the father of King John I  of Scotland.
(6) Excepting  the Channel Islands which, as remains of the Duchy of Normandy,  have been Crown possessions since 1066.
(7) 18.10.1918 Collected Works GA185
(8) See Steiner lecture 16 Nov. 1917 The Mystery of the Double. Geographic Medicine Collected Works GA 178
(9) “The Expansion of England” was also a best-selling book (1883) by the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, Prof. John. R. Seeley, appointed by Lord Rosebery
(10) Except, of course, for the six, majority Protestant  counties of Ulster, which remained part of the UK and still do.
(11) Although the battle could be described as a British victory in that the German High Seas Fleet did not risk another engagement for the rest of the war, the Royal Navy actually lost more ships in the battle (113,000 tons vs  63,000  tons for the Germans)  and men (6,784 British and 3,039 German sailors)
(12) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Navy_%28United_Kingdom%29
(13) See Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment pp.182-197
(14) Much can be gleaned in this direction from the CFR’s publicly available, but very expensive (!)  magazine Foreign Affairs.
(15) See R.Steiner, World Economy (14 lectures, July-Aug. 1922, Collected Works GA 340) and his 1919 book Towards Social Renewal (Collected Works GA 23, republished 1999, Rudolf Steiner Press)
(16) N.Ferguson, Empire, p.45
(17) See Rudolf Steiner, From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, GA 185, first 3 lectures.

                                   Terry Boardman

2010: Humanity’s Choice as Foreseen by Rudolf Steiner – Richard C. Cook.com
http://www.richardccook.com/2010/08/04/2010-humanitys-choice-as-foreseen-by-rudolf-steiner/ 

Agentur Für Alternativen (German threefolding site)

http://www.afa-berlin.com/

Anthroposophical Reflections on Basic Income

http://www.bepress.com/bis/vol2/iss2/art6/

Associative Economics (C. Houghton-Budd, UK)

http://www.associative-economics.com/

A Threefold Exercise for the Attainment of Social Faculties – Jörgen Smit

http://www.youthsection.org/index.php?id=935&L=1′%253B&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=447&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=904&cHash=aab2912bd8

Comprehensive rebuttal of Peter Staudenmaier’s attack on Steiner’s Threefold Social Ideas (Daniel Hindes, USA)

http://www.danielhindes.com/anthroposophy/2004/12/anthroposophy-a-28.html
http://www.danielhindes.com/anthroposophy/archives.html

Effective Governance in the Modern World (Sean Byrne – Ireland)   

http://localplanet.ie/content/view/89/46/

Global Network for Social Threefolding

http://globenet3.org/      

Global Social Situation/end of 20th Century (J.Ben Aharon)

http://antroposofi.org/antropsy/aharon.htm

Globalization & Threefold Society

http://guilfoil.blogspot.com/2009/05/globalization-and-r-steiners-idea-of.html    

Institute for Social Renewal (USA)

http://www.socialrenewal.com/

Institute of Social Threefolding  
http://www.threefolding.org/

Joel Wendt, USA
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/                             

John Bewick (UK) a practical guide exploring anthroposophy in our daily lives 
http://www.spiritualscience.co.uk

John Roland Penner (Toronto)                                
http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/Articles/Steiner-Social.html

Meditative Thinking and the Threefold Social Order            
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/sirvw.htm          

Michael Hallam, UK                                
http://www.threefolding.com/sitecontents.asp

Promoting the Threefold Concept in Society (German)
http://www.dreigliederung-soz.org/

Renewal of the Social Organism
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA024/English/AP1985/GA024_c04.html

Rudolf Steiner on Citizen’ s Income
http://www.threefolding.org/essays/2007-04-100.html

Rudolf Steiner Web
http://www.rudolfsteinerweb.com/Rudolf_Steiner_and_Economics.php

Social Threefolding (Soren Petersen)                                  
http://www.nyertun.net/threefold/text.htm

Social Threefolding Group

http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/1673

Some Thoughts about Money (Gavin Tang – Australia)               
http://www.southerncrossreview.org/41/tang1.htm

Sune Nordwall on threefolding & EU          
http://hem.passagen.se/thebee/indexeng.htm

THE  MYSTERIES OF SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS: THE ANTHROPOSOPHICAL SOCIAL IMPULSE – Dieter Bruell

http://bodewell.hypermart.net/documents/MysteriesofSocialEncounters-Brull.pdf 

The Social Threefolding Approach  

http://www.threefolding.net/

The Threefold Social Organism – An Introduction (S.Usher)

http://www.asnyc.org/AiAEN/PDFs/NMF1-Usher.pdf

Threefolding – by CADI (Philippines – Nicanor Perlas)

http://www.cadi.ph/

Threefolding & the Lewinsky Affair

http://antroposofi.org/artikel/laffair.htm 

Threshold Problems in Thinking the Threefold Social Order
http://3foldworld.blogspot.com/2005/05/what-is-social-threefolding.html  3Fold World  – USA

Wikipedia page on social threefolding

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_threefolding   

This page was first uploaded Dec 1999
Last update  21.7.2012

© Terry Boardman  September 1997

The recent death of Diana, Princess of Wales has led many in the media to claim that ‘a quiet revolution’ has been taking place in Britain, and that Diana was a symbol of this. We now have a chance to consider Britain’s identity, they say, where we want to go as a people in the 21st century, and they reflect on how we are becoming more ‘feminine’, ‘compassionate’, ‘emotional’, letting it ‘all hang out’; how we are more ‘democratic’ and direct, less deferential, altogether more ‘modern’ – in a word, more like Americans. Andrew Sullivan, writing in the Sunday Times (6 Sept) claimed, with some justification,  Diana as ‘an American princess’. “She was following an American script,” he wrote, “and a highly contemporary one.” But do we all want to follow ‘an American script’? Do we have any choice in the matter? Or is the American script inevitable? Is there no alternative? Diana could arguably be called the princess, and the most prominent victim, of virtual reality culture, and this culture of virtual images is indeed largely an American development. Is it Hollywood’s virtual reality world of images that the British  wish to inhabit? Are we incapable of handling reality anymore?

When are we going to realise that the tide of violence and sexual licence which so many in the media and elsewhere  are wringing their hands about (whilst at the same time actively promoting!) is very largely a result of our infatuation with America? And when are we  – politicians, policemen, businesspeople, social thinkers, mediafolk, all of us – going to stop looking automatically to America for answers, and look instead, within ourselves? So much of American culture – the part that may be called “kulcha” -  IS violent, aggressive, competitive, macho, anally-obsessed. We know this, we have had ample  evidence of it, so why do we go on worshipping at this godless temple? The images of America, the Hollywood stars (our new cultural aristocracy), American academic and business gurus (the new cardinals) the cultural icons (from the Coca-Cola can and Levis to the Manhattan skyline) -  they all take us out beyond ourselves into a Neo-Mad’n'evil Universe; we have got used to looking up to the Vast Beyond that is America, the Unholy Roman Empire of our age. From before World War II when we became besotted with Hollywood cowboys and the frantic driving pulses of jazz music through to the “kulcha” of American rock ‘n’ roll and war movies of the ’50s on to the almost ludicrous superviolence of Hollywood trash movies of the 70s and 80s, we have given up on much of our own British and European culture, convinced that the hyped-up mayhem of Americana is somehow “modern”.

A Modern Merry Kulcha?
It is not truly modern. A great deal of American kulcha is actually in its spirit stuck in the 18th or 19th, sometimes even the 17th century. America’s very stance in the world – “we are the best” or “America the land of divine Providence” (as Colin Powell repeated at last year’s Republican Party convention) ” – comes from its 18th century Founders’ utopianism. There is nothing modern in Americans’ sentimental and anachronistic jingoism. There is nothing modern in Americans’ love of guns, their insecurity and fear of each other. It is but an angry old English individualism writ large. It was predominantly English values that created America in the 18th century – the values of self-centred English settlers, frustrated with the stuffiness of their tight little isle, led to the attitude of “This is MY land; I do what I want here, so keep off my 10 (or 10,000) acres or I’ll blow you away!”

 In Britain, the harshness of the Industrial Revolution  gave rise to a moral indignation and revulsion out of which the Labour and Socialist movements were born. These contributed greatly to a new sense of the importance of community in British life which has since balanced the selfish individualism of the early 19th century. But in America, there was always the possibility that if you did not like society, the country was big enough for you to go elsewhere and either found your own society (e.g. the Mormons and others) or live alone on a spacious farmstead. The labour and socialist movements did not grow to the same extent as in Europe where the more cramped conditions forced society to find social alternatives to mere egoism. American values thus remained largely those of the early 1800s, of the frontiersman and the pioneer – the rugged individualist, and Hollywood later amplified the theme.

Easy Ride on the Superhighway?
Businessmen look to America for the latest management techniques; we all look to Bill Gates and other American computer whizzkids to tell us how to drive down American-style superhighways to a super American-style future, but so many of the ideas of these American gurus and their cutthroat version of capitalism are again rooted in the individualism of the 18th century. One only needs to look at the views expressed every week by that propaganda strumpet of American values, “The Economist” of London. It speaks of the new world we have entered since the demise of Communism, of the electronic 21st century etc etc, of the superiority of American, of “Anglo-saxon” and “Enlightenment” values, and yet its own economic dogma of a Darwinian struggle of the fittest is rooted in the 18th and early 19th centuries; amidst all the media hype about the 21st century and the millenium, new this, new that, no-one asks how the 19th century Darwinism beloved by so many in the media is justified for the 21st century. There is nothing new in the substance, in the basic groundwork of American economic philosophy; only the language of slogans and buzzwords appears to be modern because of its abstractionism.

America’s kulcha of individual freedom and rights has turned into its opposite – into one of fear and insecurity, where everyman suspects his neighbour and looks to the law and the state for protection and redress. There is also the cruel irony that America’s trivialising Mickey Mouse kulcha of youth and childhood -itself a product and a sign of Americans’ awareness of the lively immaturity of their own society – has led to a situation where adults never know when they are going to be murdered or assaulted by their own children. This is not to say that Hollywood has not produced a number of fine and serious truly adult films, but they are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of the dross which clearly appeals to a greater number of Americans.

We have been told a million times that America is the land of freedom and opportunity. We have been “sold” the American line that ‘freedom’ means ‘freedom to do’ rather than ‘freedom to think’. Was Solzhenitsyn unfree when he was in the Gulag? From the American point of view, yes. But actually, as long as he was not brainwashed, he was free to think, and it was that true freedom that kept him human and led to his achievements and contribution to humanity. When individual freedom is not accompanied by a personal spiritual sense of responsibility, people will eventually obey every crazy thought that comes into their heads. This “why the hell not” attitude has been spread by American kulcha throughout the world. “Why don’t we do it in the road?” sang the Beatles, who had idolised American pop stars, and this sentiment, this fixation on what is between the legs has been spread through the world via American kulcha. Why are drugs today such a problem? Where did the modern drug problem come from? Largely from the association with American popular kulcha, first jazz and then pop and rock music. The drug kulcha was then legitimised by American intellectuals such as Timothy Leary and Carlos Castenada, who consciously propagated drugs as a way to experience a higher reality – a dependence on the greater force of nature to do it for you instead of relying on your own inner force.

Out There – In Here
Here we come to the nub of the problem, for the American worship of the individual paradoxically leads to seeking answers in powerful FORCES, in external ways which overwhelm – in technology (fast cars, rocketry, computers) or nature forces (drugs, sexual licence). This “culture” of force actually works to negate the individual and remove the quiet space which the individual needs to think and contemplate. Out of this calm centre comes real freedom. The American solution to problems is always OUT THERE, whereas in fact the answer is invariably IN HERE. Many modern American psychotherapies are based, not on American or western approaches, but on the ancient knowledge of American Indians or of Asian spiritual disciplines; the answer is sought out there, beyond me, beyond my culture. Such psychotherapies may produce more efficient, seemingly ‘centred’ businesspeople, but all too often they still do not question the fundaments of American business practice. They simply practise them less stressfully and more personably.

The central problem of the modern world in the late 20th century is essentially a spiritual one. We seek the divine, something greater than ourselves, even if we do not realise it. Many of us, particularly the so-called liberal agnostics and atheists, may not want to admit it in this secular humanist age, but that is what we seek deep down, some evidence that such exists, something ‘exciting’, that takes us beyond ourselves, if only for the duration of a Hollywood movie. We are too idle to think for ourselves, to realise that thinking is itself a spark of divinity within us, so we look for the spiritual in what is vast and overwhelming, whether it be sex, drugs, rock ‘n’roll or technological gimmickry; we wish to be driven and not to drive. American kulcha IS vast and overwhelming, and we rush to immerse ouselves in it – the latest movie, the latest computer, the latest kinky novel, the latest fashion.

American kulcha  is dominated by images of FORCE and POWER. These are of “Almighty God”. In America we feel subconsciously the power of the Father God, God the Omnipotent. We feel titanic forces, of creation and destruction, mostly the latter. Sweep me away God, erase my troublesome sense of self, this hard-won gain of centuries! So many of us do not really believe in real individuality. We wish only to belong, to conform, to be ‘hip’, ‘cool’, ‘bad’, ‘wicked’, and thus fashionable, i.e. one of the crowd: e pluribus unum (out of the many, one). From the Bible belt certainties of fundamentalists to the mawkish God-Bless-America sentimentality of Clintonesque liberals, so much of America is The Old Old Testament – of the chosen people under Providence and the forceful commandments of a mighty Machogod. There is little of the New Testament, little Christianity in the American Way. What is truly Christian in American society today comes precisely in what is NOT of the conventional picture of the American Way, in what is NOT  the exponentially expanding materialism of the American Dream. The truly Christian in America is to be found in the suffering and the victories of individuals and communities in America who have left the American Way and found themselves, people who know that it is more important to be a human being than to be a redneck, a feminist, a flag-waver.

Imperator Juvenalis
This is no criticism of the American people, but only of AmericanISM, which is not what America could be; Mark Twain would have despaired of it. It is a criticism of the presumption that America is fit to rule the world although the national community of America is not mature enough for the task.  This is an appeal to individuals who live in Britain, in Europe, not to lose confidence in their own path of destiny and sense of self. They need to recognise that America is a juvenile country; while it may have the vitality of youth, it has little maturity as a society, little depth, and almost zero humility. Americans, many of whom give the impression of living on an enormous island, ignorant of the rest of the world, need more humility vis-a-vis the rest of the world. They are in the unfortunate position of a people who have been forced by their own elites into donning a world imperial mantle before they deserved it or were ready for it. With a history of only 120 years behind them and only 33 years after the end of their own appallingly savage and divisive Civil War, they began to strut their stuff on the world stage in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Their elites  pushed them into this prematurely rather than giving them a dozen generations of peace and non-involvement in which they could really get over the wounds of the Civil War and develop their community’s substance. A combination of European stupidity and the greedy and envious ambition of American elites brought America to the pinnacle of world power just 50 years after 1898. What America should have been doing in those years was keeping itself to itself and developing its own maturity.

Instead, we see a society that reminds us not so much of the “mature” Rome of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius as of the earlier more decadent Rome  of Nero and Caligula, a Rome that becomes inwardly ever more decadent as its outer power grows. The world unhappily is dominated by a prematurely powerful and juvenile nation. But an ability to make powerful machines through the force of intellect (though the force may be American, the intellect is a gift of Europe and Asia) does not entitle Americans to lecture other cultures on how to run their societies, any more than a 14 year-old chess or computer genius should presume to tell his elders how to run society and order their lives. He may be intellectually precocious yet emotionally stunted and amoral.

Euro-fears run deep
In addition to the power of the US dollar and the subconscious shame felt by many Europeans about the European Civil War 1914-45 which the Americans decided to save us from, there is another factor which drives Europeans to look to America for salvation. Deep down, Europeans have always been afraid of “the East”. Though liberals like to shout ‘mea culpa’ because of the Crusades and later European imperialism which lasted nearly 500 years (1500-2000), they too easily forget that from the Huns in the 4th century, the Arabs in the 7th and 8th, to the Mongols in the 13th, and the Turks until 1685, Europe was under threat from Asia for 1200 years. Europeans feared, and not without reason, that their new individualising culture would be overwhelmed by the ancient collectivisms of Asia. Today, they look uneasily at the burgeoning power of China, the next “threat” whose name the western media dare not speak too loudly for fear of losing too many fat Chinese contracts for western companies. They also look uneasily at what their media insinuate or declare is the growing and dangerous power of Islamic countries.

There are powerful and influential forces working though the Anglo-American media which have an interest in tapping this subconsious western fear of “the East”. It is largely these forces which are driving us all further, faster towards the safe brawny arms of those virtual if not virtuous all-American heroes Uncle Sam, Superman, Batman, Rambo. Robocop, Terminator and the rest. “American brain and brawn will save us, as it did in 1917 and 1944″. We are not far now from the day when some kind of northern hemisphere confederation, led and controlled by America, will unite to defend itself against some imagined 21st century assault from Asia. Fear and a chronic lack of imagination will drive Europeans into such a disastrous arrangement. What we in Europe really need to recognise is that historically and culturally we stand between the extreme individualism of America and the extreme collectivism of Asia, and we also contain that polarity within our own continent – from the individualist instincts of the English to the more communal and social instincts of the Russians; in the middle, looking both ways, the Janus-headed Germans.

Europe’s Threefold Ideal
To align ourselves categorically with either America or Asia out of fear would be a colossal error and unworthy of Europe’s history. On the contrary, we need above all – and especially here in Britain where the modern commercial and industrial economy took off – to develop new thinking, both individual and social, which can truly realise the meaning of that great European idea which was blocked by the calamity of the French Revolution, namely, “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity”. Those ideals were not the product of the French Revolution, nor even of the so-called “Enlightenment”. Rather, they were frustrated by the Revolution. They arose at the end of the 18th century as the inexorable result of European, indeed all human, historical development – a process in which politics and economy had first been subject to the spiritual sphere and then had progressively emancipated themselves from it, demanding, and to a limited extent obtaining, their own autonomy.

These three ideals, or rather, this association of the three, is infinitely profound and creatively archetypal. Unlike the ideas of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo, and Erasmus Darwin, not to mention the Freemasonic framers of the US Constitution, they reach far beyond a late 18th century reality, but they have remained only slogans. We have not consciously worked with them or sought to realise what they signify. They remain on the drawing board, a blueprint for a building that was never constructed. In the 19th century, many tried, consciously or unconsciously to bring fraternity into being. Socialism and Communism, even Fascism in its way, can be seen in part as abortive and mistaken efforts to realise the ideal of fraternity, and to allow fraternity to take its place beside the modicum of liberty and equality which had already been achieved. The totalitarian attempts to realise fraternity have failed, but we still need to turn the three ideals into practical social realities: liberty in the cultural, religious and artistic sphere, equality in the sphere of law and rights, fraternity and service to each other and to the planet in the sphere of economics. This means: a) a recognition of the fact of the world economy which has emerged in this century; we all depend on each other in this world economy. It must therefore be open and world-spanning; b) a respect for the differing national traditions and customs of law and rights, which reflect the individual histories of particular communities; “when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and not as the UN insists”; c) a firm acknowledgement of the need for absolute individual freedom to think and create in the spiritual-cultural sphere.

We failed to realise that the three realms of society each need their own independence and way of working, while yet remaining interrelated. Clinging to old monotheistic and monopolistic habits, we sought to make the three subservient to one. The Communists in the East made them subservient to the Political State; the result was disaster for the cultural and economic life, and eventually, for the political state itself. The capitalists in the West, and especially in America, have made them subservient to the Economy, an economy not based on the true economic principle of service to one’s fellows, which is fraternity, but on the cultural principle of liberty and freedom – the “free” market in which we are “free” to be wage slaves, selling ourselves and our labour, “free” to exploit our fellows with all the artifice we can think of, “free” to gamble on the stock market. The result, as we are being forced by events to realise, will be disaster for the cultural and political life, as well as for the Economy itself.

It is not unitarianism (one over two) we need, but a genuine threefolding (three-as-one). If we can realise this in our social arrangements, we shall create a newly moral society, which can gain the respect of Asia. If we do not do it, Asia will indeed eventually return to the assault, compelled by its own deeply-held religious and spiritual instincts to eliminate such an immoral society as we are now allowing to develop. Asia currently borrows the ideas for most of its material and financial technology from the West; it may even mouth the western economic dogmas of the free market and the survival of the fittest etc, but very many Japanese, Chinese, Indians, and Arabs, deep down, do not believe any of it. Like the Japanese, in their century of modernisation from 1853-1945, many Asians borrow from the West in order the better to be able to bury us and what they deem to be our pernicious and inhuman civilisation and wipe its stain from history. And if we continue to be mesmerised by the awesome but immoral power and the glitzy trivialising glamour of Americanism today, if we ignore what Europe can contribute out of the depths of its creative imagination, then Asia will replace us, and open another chapter in human development.

This page was first uploaded  Dec 1999  Last updated 9.2..2009

This article first appeared in the German magazine Info3 (Feb. 2000 issue) under the title “Für eine “biodynamische” Ökonomie”  (For a Biodynamic Economy)

An interesting article appeared in “The Independent” of 6th December, written by Andreas Whittam-Smith. He was the first editor of the paper when it first came out in the 80s. The article was titled: “Mr Schroder [sic], it’s not the British, but you who has let the euro down.” Under the picture of Whittam-Smith was a quote from the article: ‘What’s under threat is Germany’s softer, kinder form of capitalism – consensus capitalism.’ Accompanying the article was a large photo of  Gerhard Schroeder’s head as he was  making a speech, his head framed not by a halo but by the German iron cross (attributed to Christof Stache/AP).

The article starts by saying why the Germans had been reluctant to abandon the D-mark – memories of the hyperinflation of the 1920s and went on to describe how Germany had insisted that other EU members tighten up their fiscal situation to guard against inflation. It then says that in fact inflation hasn’t been a problem in the 90s, and suddenly introduces the following sentence: “What’s under threat is a very German form of capitalism. It is a  softer, kinder, less demanding and more protective  form of capitalism than the Anglo-saxon version. Under its rules, it is difficult to declare workers redundant. And the Germans don’t wish to give it up.” Whittam-Smith goes on  about the  Vodafone hostile takeover bid for Mannesmann which was criticised by the German Chancellor, and says: “But foreign investors saw the matter differently. They perceived the Chancellor as disapproving of  an attempt to consolidate and strengthen the European mobile phone market at a moment when the old Continent has a world lead in the use of such technology, which in turn is at the centre of the industrial revolution through which we are now passing. They saw this as a crippling lack of enthusiasn for open markets.” [which foreign investors, we can ask ourselves?]. He goes on to mention the criticisms of the German position made by Wim Duisenberg, Dutch president of the European Central Bank, who said that the German action rejecting and criticising Vodafone’s bid  “… does not enhance the image we want to have of being an increasingly market-driven economy across the euro-area.” [who is "we"? the reader may ask]. Whittam-Smith then referred to an ambiguous remark allegedly made by Herr Schroeder to the effect that, in view of  Britain’s “intransigence” over the European withholding tax which the British government rejects: “if all else fails, one may have to resort to national solutions.” Scornfully, Whittam-Smith points out that Germany, the country that  sought to impose Europe-wide limits on national governments’ abilities to tax and spend is now considering “going it alone”. “One analyst”, he writes, “said: ‘This isn’t so much Fortress Europe as Schloss Deutschland.”[which analyst? One Andreas Whittam-Smith perhaps? Unattributed comments are so useful in journalism; you can pad out any number of articles with them].

Then, as the British say, he gets to the beef, what he really wants to say: “The problem for the 11 countries comprising the euro-zone, of  which Germany is the largest, is that the Anglo-saxon business model is not simply a theoretical concept that individual nations can choose to disregard. It is the ruling ideology of money managers around the world, who control and direct capital flows. The expected behaviour of interest rates and stockmarkets are naturally major influences on the way international funds are invested, but countries and currency zones are also rated on their adherence to the principles of hard capitalism. On this last criterion the euro-zone gets an increasingly poor mark [note the schoolmasterly turn of phrase]. The result is that since 1 January $480bn of capital has been withdrawn from Europe while only $230bn has gone in, leaving a huge net deficit. This is the technical reason why the euro has been weak.” To put the final intellectual boot in, while acknowledging that there have been some better economic statistics in continental Europe recently, Whittam-Smith argues that unemployment there is likely to remain high and cites President Clinton’s recent “boastfulness” about American economic statistics and low unemployment.

Now what is the context for these remarks? At the end of the last century in November 1999 we witnessed a major international protest against neoliberal, that is, predominantly “Anglo-saxon”, economics in Seattle which has resulted in the collapse of the WTO talks. Even Clinton felt it necessary to make remarks in acknowledgement of the protesters’ demands. It is this very “Anglo-saxon” model that is driving the kind of hard-edged globalisation which the protesters in Seattle and their sympathisers throughout the world opposed. The Independent’s line on foreign policy – and this issue is by no means only an economic one; it goes to the heart of the question of control over the destiny of Europe – echoes that of “The Economist”, the proud herald of what is called the “Anglo-saxon” neoliberal model of capitalism. Both newspapers’ views on foreign policy in turn echo those of the Royal Institute of International House (Chatham House), which has for decades been the principle source of ideas for  the British foreign policy elite. Journalists, particularly from “The Economist”, circulate around the British broadsheet media which are read by so-called ‘opinion-formers’. Hamish Macrae of “The Economist” regularly writes on economic matters for “The Independent”, for example. At the height of the Gulf Crisis in early 1991 “The Economist” used to refer to  George Bush as ‘our friend’. Bush, you may remember, was the President who promised in his inaugural speech in January 1989 to work for “a kinder, gentler America”. Just two years later he was leading a massive crusade against Saddam Hussein and proclaiming the arrival of the New World Order. In the 1990s millions all over the world have experienced at first hand the economic dimension of that New World Order, and it  was precisely this model of economic behaviour  which was being objected to at Seattle. It is a model that puts the self-centred desires of shareholders before the interests of consumers, workers, and the society at large. It is a model that is based on the desire of the individual (manager or shareholder) for self-aggrandisement. If I wish to take over a company in order to make my company more successful, I simply gather the requisite amount of funds with which to tempt the shareholders of my intended victim and announce to that company’s management that I intend to take their company over whether they like it or not.

In the 1990s we have seen the end of the Cold War and the triumph of what are called by newspapers like “The Independent” and “The Economist” ‘Anglo-saxon’ values of  ‘freedom’, ‘choice’, ‘diversity’ etc. Yet here in Andreas Whittam-Smith we have a representative of what one might call a propaganda organ – “The Independent” -  of the New World Order speaking insidiously about “the ruling ideology of money managers around the world” and countries being “rated on their adherence to the principles of hard capitalism.” This is enough to make every decent conspiracy theorist cheer: “you see, there IS no difference between Marxists and capitalists, just as we’ve always said!!” Just as citizens of communist countries were required to toe the Party’s ideological line, capitalist countries today are called on to demonstrate the required degree of obedience to the principles of Anglo-saxon economic ideology. If they do not, their economies are blown off course into the Bermuda Triangle or else suddenly find themselves becalmed in some economic Sargasso Sea as happened to the Asian economies in 1997.

And who does the blowing and becalming? According to “The Economist” and friends, the “democratic market-driven” Anglo-saxon model means that it is “the blind hand of the market” that determines investment decisions – the sum total of millions of decisions made by millions of investors. Well, yes and no. There are millions of investors, yes, but most of them act like seagulls following big ships; they make their decisions by shadowing the actions of the big institutional investors. Occasionally, economics and business correspondents in the “Anglo-saxon” media even admit as much. Those big institutional investors are headed by how many individuals? – Not many. Several hundred at the most perhaps – the same sort of number that congregates at  meetings of the secretive Bilderberg Group that is widely recognised as having paved the way for the Single Market and the Single Currency. These are the same  group meetings to which the only members of the media allowed to attend  – as rapporteurs – are  staff of “The Economist”. In other words, significant movements of “the market”, such as the sharp decline in inward investment into “Euroland” this year or the drastic withdrawals from Asian stocks in 1997-8 may in fact well be orchestrated by elitist groups that are far from ‘democratic’ as “The Economist” and “The Independent” would have us believe. There is then no alternative allowed to the hard capitalism of the Anglo-saxon model – no freedom, no choice, no diversity. No country or group is to be allowed to operate any other form of capitalism, least of all a “softer, kinder, more consensual” form.

Is it not interesting that of the developed countries, it should be Germany that offers resistance to this Anglo-saxon model? Despite the fact that there is indeed a strongly communitarian strain in British society, a strain that has fed the development of the Labour Party in the 20th century and to which even “One Nation” conservatives like Edward Heath and Tony Blair appeal, the strain of self-centred individualism in British culture is, if anything, a good deal stronger and more tenacious. At the end of the 20th century, the atomism inherent in this strain is indeed threatening to rip the fabric of  British society apart slowly, seam by seam, as adherence to traditional Christian morality has declined. Let us look at a couple of remarks Rudolf Steiner made on this question of Germany and Britain. Because of the dominant strain of individualism in their culture, the “Anglo-saxons” have not been able to do  otherwise than develop the kind of economic ideology they have. Rudolf Steiner said as much when he urged his listeners not to condemn the British for the Opium Trade:

“…just as it would be nonsense to underestimate English life or English culture – English civilisation – so it would be nonsense to believe that something of this sort (the Opium Trade) could have been avoided in the overall context of  English evolution. It belongs to it.” “What was won at that time (of the Opium Wars 1839-42, 1860-62) belongs now to the whole configuration of the British Empire….if you want to judge the yield of the Opium War you must look at it as a whole. Then you will see that what has grown out of those millions – after all this has been going on for a century – is something which is preparing to rule the world, to overrun the world; that is what may be found in what was won at that time!”

The Opium Trade and subsequent interventions in China were the first occasions of significant Anglo-American collaboration in overseas economic issues. Hard-edged laissez-faire capitalism, “red in tooth and claw”, was the dominant economic ideology in Britain at the time. This kind of thinking that led the British and the American opium merchants to demand their rights at the expense of anyone else’s is what Whittam-Smith calls “the ruling ideology of money managers around the world”. Nothing has essentially changed in Anglo-American economic thinking since the 1840s. Socialism arose as a reaction against the injustices and immorality produced by just this kind of economic ideology, but socialism was taken too far and out of it came the monster of communism. The 20th century was dominated by the struggle between the Anglo-American-led capitalist bloc and the Russian-led communist bloc, and now that that struggle has ended with the demise of the communist bloc, we are back to where we started – and it would seem, in the Anglo-American countries, little the wiser, judging by the likes of “The Independent” and “The Economist.” Even the foreign policy paradigm has returned to the multipolar realpolitik of the age of Metternich, Henry Kissinger’s idol.

One can sense in Whittam-Smith’s words a kind of suppressed gloating – the intimation that it is pointless for Mannesmann, for Schröder, for Germany to resist the inexorable march of the Anglo-saxon economic legions. If they do, well, it’s off to the Bermuda Triangle or the Sargasso Sea with them – they will only ruin their own economies. But Whittam-Smith and those who think like him may find their prognostications dashed in the long run. 80 years ago Rudolf Steiner pointed to the historical fact that action in the material world is dominated by the principle of dualism. When a domineering principle arises, it cannot but call forth its opposite. He described how three major cultural impulses have arisen in Europe that mirror the thinking of three distinct historical epochs, namely, what he called “the hierarchical theocratic cultic” element, which stemmed ultimately from Egypt and recreated itself in the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Middle Ages. This was followed by “the  diplomatic,.political, and military element”, a continuation of the impulse of the Roman Empire, which came to expression in the efforts of France to dominate Europe under Louis XIV and Napoleon, and then finally “the commerical economic element”, which is truly of the modern age, and stems from Britain. Each of these three elements has sought in its time to dominate Central Europe; each has succeeded for a time, but each has ultimately failed. The Egyptian-Papal spiritual element was pushed back first by the Minnesänger, by Walther von der Vogelweide, by the German kings and then by Huss, Luther and the Reformation. One can see how an important stream in British life – that of  Wyclif and the British Protestants – helped in this; Henry VIII could not have separated England from Rome if there had not already been a substantial anti-Papal tradition in English spiritual life. Protestant England, a major power, became a source of inspiration for Continental reformers and protestants. Secondly, the Roman-French military impulse was repulsed first by the Swiss and then by the Germans, assisted again of course by the British; Austria, Prussia and  Britain provided most of the opposition to Napoleon, even though it may have been Russia that broke his back. The Anglo-American commercial economic element that now seeks world domination will in its turn inevitably be resisted by Central Europe as the other two domineering principles have been. German resistance to that domination played a significant part in the process that led to World War One, as it had become clear to the rulers of the British Empire that their global hegemony in industrial and commercial terms was being threatened.

Today Germany is again the main economic force in Central Europe and cannot but become the focus of attempts to resist Anglo-American dominance. Steiner went on to say that in each case the resistance to the dominant principle took on the nature of  that principle. The Papacy was resisted spiritually. The French were defeated militarily. Likewise the Anglo-Americans will be resisted economically. Germany’s catastrophic error in 1914 was to resist British economic imperialism by recourse to war – the means of the previous age. On the contrary, the resistance of Central Europe ought to be based on new economic ideas, and these ideas need to be drawn from the spiritual life of modern humanity. At present, this is not the case. The “softer, kinder, consensual” German capitalism referred to by Whittam-Smith is based not so much on modern spiritual impulses as on social elements within German history, some of which – the strong craft tradition, the feeling for heimat and  locale, the respect for bureaucracy -  go  back to the Middle Ages or the 18th century. If Germany is to lead Central European resistance to Anglo-American “hard capitalism” – and it is clear that this is what the Anglo-American elite and their representatives expect – it is vital that the approach to economic life contained in the idea of social threefolding which has been nurtured within the anthroposophical movement should no longer be discussed only within anthroposophical circles but should come to the forefront of  debate in wider society. It is surely Central Europe – with its patchwork quilt of nations, regions, and communities – that has the task of integrating the principle of fraternity into the world’s economic system which until now has been dominated by the principles of  liberty and equality so strongly espoused by the Anglo-Americans. Their self-centred approach to economic thinking has been determined by the natural insularity of the British (and also, arguably, of the Americans) and hence the atomistic idea of individual self-interest: everyone should have an equal right to exploit everyone else.

If Central Europe is able to integrate fraternity into economics without recourse to state intervention as in the discredited socialist model, it will find that, as in the past, it will receive a great measure of support from a substantial stream, even if not the majority, within Anglo-American culture itself. At the end of the twentieth century, as the representatives of Anglo-American “hard capitalism” met in triumphalist mood in Seattle, the city of Microsoft and Boeing, to map out the next phase of  their global domination, they were brought up sharp by the resistance of this underground “protestant” stream from within their own culture. Yet just as the really new ideas that challenged the Papacy came from Central Europe, and just as the really new ideas that challenged French cultural domination came, not from Britain, but from Central Europe (from Goethe, Schiller, Fichte and others), so the new ideas today will also have to come from Central Europe and be taken up by those outside it. To be an organic farmer is to say “No” to chemicals and fertilisers; it is a good but essentially negative stance. A more creative step is to be  a biodynamic farmer and  to farm on the basis of spiritual knowledge and insight, on the basis of the fraternity of the spiritual and earthly worlds and their mutual interaction. We need “biodynamic thinking” in economics today – indeed a “softer, kinder, more consensual” economics that serves society as a whole, and that puts  customers and workers at least on a par with shareholders, if not above them. The main impulse for this kind of economics is to be expected, not from the Anglo-American world, but from Central Europe.

If, in the 21st century, Central Europe is not to repeat its errors of the 19th century -  when it abandoned its own spiritual culture and, mesmerised by the economic and military power of the West, embraced the  the Social Darwinist ideology of ‘dog eat dog’ which led to the catastrophe of 1914-45 -  it will need to put into practice the kind of economic thinking that Rudolf Steiner brought forward in Central Europe in response to that catastrophe, and which is still  waiting to be applied. Germany neglected to apply it between 1919 and 1929, and the result was Hitler. It neglected to apply it after 1945 and after 1989, and the result has been the steady Americanisation of Europe and the globalisation of the world according to the principles of neoliberal hard capitalism. As the new millennium dawns, is it not finally time for Europe to look to its own spiritual sources for economic thinking instead of  to Chicago and New York?

© Terry Boardman Dec 1999

This page was uploaded Feb.2000  Last updated 21.7.2012